Windows Indexing bug?

Within Windows Search, try searching for an old file (say, created at least a week ago) with an apostrophe or single quote (') in the file name. Did Windows find the file for you?

According to my testing, Windows Search Indexing (for file names) doesn't respect special characters like hyphens and apostrophe/single quotes.

Welcome to the forum

Try rebuilding.



Quotation marks allow characters such as -. ~, [, ], (, ) to be interpreted as literals, whereas the initial ':~ ' tells Search to allow wildcards within the quoted string

You can refer to the examples in the following documentation. Personally, it all does my head in and my head only has the capacity to explode 3 times per day:

Advanced Query Syntax

And FYI


There are a few superusers debating wildcards (tilde ~ etc) in this thread. Note it is for Windows 7 but I believe the wildcard useage is still the same or effective?



Also, there are other tools