When you pile up hundreds and thousands of files on your PC, finding the one you need at any given time can become a challenge. Even though File Explorer in Windows offers a built-in search option, it can still take a while to get to the files you want if you don't make full use of the tools available to you.

Thankfully, we're hear to help with exactly that. Let's take a look at a few things you should be doing to improve your search results and find your files faster. If you follow these suggestions, you'll save yourself a lot of time with Windows searches and get back to the work that matters much more quickly.

5 Organize your files properly

Make them identifiable

I know no one likes to be lectured on the importance of organizing your files, but it really does make a difference if you're constantly struggling to find the things you need. There are a few things you can do to make your files easier to find. First off, create folders and subfolders to help you organize them depending on topics, projects, or clients, for example. Even if you occasionally misplace a file, having dedicated folders for them gives you a smaller scope of files to search through, which already speeds up your search quite a bit.

It also helps to give your files consistent and logical names. I know the temptation to type in a bunch of random characters is very strong, but consistent file names make it easier to know what to search for later down the line. If all your expense reports start with "Expense report" in the file name, you already have a pretty good idea of what to look for if you need to find records of your past expenses.

Training yourself to be more organized takes some time, but it will absolutely help in the long run.

4 Refine your search with proper syntax

Exclude terms or use wildcards

Another trick that can help you find the files you need is using some syntax terms to help filter your results. Using the expense report example we mentioned above, let's say you want an expense report and you don't remember the month it was from, but you know for sure it wasn't December. You can add NOT december at the end of your search to exclude files with the word December in them.

Here are a couple of tricks you can use to refine your search:

• NOT - Excludes the subsequent terms from the search results
• "" (quotation marks) - Searches for a specific set of consecutive words in the file name

One particular trick that can come really in handy is using wildcards. These are characters any string of characters in a file name, and they essentially allow you to find files when you only remember a specific part of their name, or even their file format. There are two kinds of wildcards you can use in your search terms:

• * (asterisk) - Matches any string of random characters. You can add it at the start, middle, or end of your search terms. For example, typing *.mp4 will find all files with the MP4 extension. Alternatiely, typing Expense* will find any file that starts with the word "expense" followed by any other characters.
• ? (question mark) - Matches a single random character. If you've only forgotten one or a few specific characters in the file name, you can use question marks in their place and they will be matched to any character.

3 Use search filters

Narrow down your options

There are some extra ways you can narrow down your results to just the files you might need built into Windows Search. By clicking Search options in the File Explorer toolbar, you have plenty of search filters you can use to specify the kind of file you're looking at. First off, you can choose to search in all the subfolders contained within your current folder, or search just the main folder you're in. Then you have many more options:

• Date modified: Find files based on when you last edited them
• Kind: Find files based on their file type (such as videos, images, or documents)
• Size: Filter results based on file size. For example, if you're looking for a long video, there's a good chance the file is over 1GB, potentially even more.
• System files: Include system files in your search results
• Zipped (compressed) folders: Include ZIP files in your search
• File contents: Search for contents inside the file you're looking for. This can be used if you remember a specific word or phrase inside a document, but not the file name itself.

Some extra filters are available by using specific keywords in the search. For example, you can type in ext:mp4 to narrow down a specific file format.

2 Change indexed locations

Improve search performance

When you perform searches on your entire PC, certain locations are indexed by the search engine so that files inside those locations can be found more quickly. In most cases, the indexed locations should be ideal for your searches, but if you're storing files in unusual locations (such as directly on the root of a hard drive), you might want to change the locations indexed by Windows.

There are a couple ways you can do this. You can go in the Settings app and navigate to Privacy and Security > Searching Windows, and choose the Enhanced search mode. This will index your entire PC, so all of your files are searched at all times, but this can have a performance impact on some PCs while files are being indexed. Alternatively, if you stick with the Classic mode, you can click Customize search locations to add or remove specific folders from the search index.

1 Save and pin your searches

Find the same files again

Is there a set of files you want to consistently come back to but you don't have the time to put them under the same folder? Windows Search has another feature that might help you, which is the ability to save your searches to revisit later. Saving your searches allows you to find files you've searched for before, but it can also be a reliable way to find new files that adhere to the same naming conventions you've been using, for example. If you forget to put files in the right folders but they always have the right names, this can make them easier to find, no matter where they're saved, for example.

You can use the ellipsis button in the toolbar while showing search results and use the Pin to Quick access button to add a search to the Home page in File Explorer. Or, you can right-click the search results page to save the search results as a file you can open later.

Find the files you need quickly

Using these tips, you're going to be able to find your files much more quickly. Some of these may be apparent to many users, but they're also things that are easy to overlook for less experienced users, so it's worth keeping these points in mind. If you want the absolute fastest way to find any file on your PC, it's also worth considering Everything. This is a custom search engine for Windows 11 (and earlier) that quickly indexes and finds every file on your PC, offering a faster and more lightweight solution to file searching.