Win 7 - search is not returning results

Looking for a certain document, I tried using the search the computer window. I got no results at all. Then I ran a test entering words I knew I should be able to find. Nothing. Any ideas??

 

Use a different search program. Windows' isn't very good.

http://www.voidtools.com/

 

Hello there.

By the way, best wishes to Wales. My wife and I visited there in the mid to late 1980's...Cardiff and Swansea mostly.
We enjoyed the land and the people very much.

In response to your post... I was searching for a Microsoft Word document and perhaps a report document generated by QuickBooks. I hadn't thought of something so complicated as what you seemed to be suggesting. On all my other PC's, I simply click the START button, and the large gathering of frequently used program icons appears in a tall, narrow menu immediately above the START button. Just below that, there is a narrow SEARCH window that says, "Search Programs and Files" in faded type.

On all my other PC's--and until today, on this computer as well--I could enter a word in that search window, hit ENTER, and discover a list of most likely matches from the various programs, documents, and other fragments found in this computer that might have contained something similar to my input. Today, with the exception that follows, all I get is "No items match your search." This is the new, unhappy experience.

NOW, after more testing, I see that it IS returning SOME things, but only program icons and things from the Control Panel--no documents at all (I discovered that when I entered the letter "C"). Incidentally, when I entered ".jpg," I again received "No items match your search."

I'm only searching on this one computer for items that are, in fact, saved to this one computer. Puzzling. This has never happened before. It certainly seems that something somewhere within it has caused the search capability to malfunction.

Thanks for your interest. Unless you're up quite late, I'll hear from you later.

 

The thing is, Tony, this has always worked before. It's handy for quickly locating documents, pictures, etc when you have a fragment of the file name. It works on all my other computers and I like it...it's simple. I think we should be able to get this to work. But...

I assume that link is to an alternative. Thanks for the input. I'll have a look.

 

The Search function is one of the most useful and frequently used feature in Windows 7. And if it does get broken for some reason and does not display results at all or display results incorrectly, it can be quite frustrating. This article will tell you how you can repair your Windows Search and the Search Indexer function.
http://goo.gl/pykVsD