Search and Ye Shall Find

There's no reason to keep everything organized these days.

It defies common sense to be messy. And yet, there's no reason to keep your files insanely neat these days. There's search for that.

If you started your computing life on Windows as so many of us did, you’ve learned by experience in XP that search typically takes forever and hardly ever finds what you need. Even if you know that’s not the case these days, old habits are now hard to break (witness PC users’ backlash to Windows 8’s lack of a start menu, and the fact that most new Mac users’ first inclination is to look for a start button or pin everything to the dock). Plus, no matter where you started computing, any self-respecting tech user has learned to keep their files meticulously organized in folders. You know you can find the homework you finished a decade and a half ago because it’s a dozen folders deep in your Documents.

Awesome. But you can go ahead and throw that conventional wisdom away, quit being so clever, and start saving some time.

See, OS X has had Spotlight search since OS X Tiger was released 8 years ago, and Windows has had half-decent search built-in since Vista was released 2 years later. There’s a ton of search tools for Linux, with the most user-friendly (hello, Ubuntu!) having similar easily-accessible desktop search. In all 3, you can open a search pane with a simple keyboard shortcut (CMD+space on OS X, the Windows key on a PC, Super on Ubuntu) and start typing without moving your hands away from the keyboard. Chances are, you’ll directly find whatever you’re looking for, like magic. Even if you’re away from your computer, if you store your files in Dropbox or another online storage service, you can find your files with the same ease using the service’s search tool.

Once you start doing that by default for everything you ever open, you’ll realize how much quicker it is than clicking through folders to find what you want every time. There’s less for you to remember, less to click through, and more time for you to do what you set down to do instead of spending all your time getting ready to work.

Feeding the Engine

Now search isn’t perfect. It can only find the info you give it. So instead of spending your time organizing files into meticulous folders, think about how you’ll find them again in search.

It’s been a long time since you could only use 11 characters in your file names — for the most part, you can use up to 255 characters in most file names these days and be safe on any computer you use. That’s a lot of space to make your file names give a lot more info than “New Document 2.docx”. You can do better than that — you know it’ll be far easier to find “2013 Filed and Signed Income Tax Return.pdf” by search than it will be to find “scan.pdf” in your Documents/Finance/Government/Tax/2013/ folder. So add more data to your file names — it will only take a second extra, but will save you a ton of time in finding your files later.

Then, there’s the other data in your files: metadata. The date you made the file, the date you last edited it, the place you created it (especially in photos), and so much more. Most search tools will see that info, and by running an advanced search in Finder or Explorer, you’ll be able to quickly find files based on when you made them and more — something that’s especially great for photos and videos that often have cryptic names auto-generated by cameras.

Oh, and don’t forget about folders. I know I said you shouldn’t worry so much about folders, but they’re still useful — especially since you won't want to go rename everything. You likely don’t need a dozen levels of folders, but they’re still great tools for putting your 2013 vacation pictures together in something that’ll be easy to find with search. And even for everything else, there’s still no ready to be way too messy — you’ve still got to backup and move this stuff eventually — so some broad-category folders will go a long ways. You won’t need to go change what you have right now, per se, but you’ll likely end up over time with a lot less folders holding a lot more files — and, thanks to search, you’ll find everything quicker than you ever did with your intricate folders.

But it’s not just folders and files you’ll be looking for — it’s data stored in programs, too. So many programs, frustratingly enough, don’t lend their data to easy searching outside of their own app. Good luck finding what Kindle books are on your computer right from your system search. That’s not all programs, though. Evernote, your email app, your browser history and bookmarks, iTunes, and quite a few other programs (including almost anything that syncs with iCloud) make it easy to find your data right from your universal search — and for those that don’t automatically work, there’s often search plugins to expose their data to your system search. Evernote’s especially nice, since you can save everything there, from web clips to iPad drawings to shots of your Post-it notes, and easily find it from everywhere.

There’s More to Search than Finding

So you’ve stopped looking through Finder for every single file. Hopefully you’ve also started launching apps from search instead of looking through your Start Menu or Launchpad every time. Congrats. You’ve only started to scratch the surface of what you can do with search.

See, even with your built-in search you can also search the web, look up info in other apps on Windows 8, find definitions and do simple math on a Mac, jump directly to system settings, and more. But with a launcher app like the fabled Quicksilver or Alfred for Mac, or Launchy on a PC, you can do so much more. They’re power is their extendability — you can make them do anything you want. Check the weather, find WolframAlpha info without going to a website, do advanced math, start playing an album in iTunes, empty your trash, and so much more right from your search tool of choice — the same tool that’s opening your files and launching your apps will be simplifying everything else on your Mac. I’ve made Alfred scripts to open my default Scratchpad document where I jot quick notes throughout the day, and to make a new Kirby blog post template to simplify posting right from Alfred. There’s so much more you can do, both on your own and with pre-made templates.

So stop looking for stuff. Start searching, and you’ll realize your computer can actually simplify your life like it’s supposed to.

Originally published on October 20th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 7

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