Like many others, I too had a time when I lost faith in Windows 7’s search feature, particularly with indexing the contents of py, sql, php files. These were files that I use a lot.

I knew I had the phrase in some file but Windows 7 search returned no search.

I even switched to Google Desktop Search(GDS). But GDS does not search contents of php, py files. It did search sql files because I set it up as a text file type.

So I reverted to Windows 7 Search.

Before I gave up on Windows 7 search earlier, I did notice that it indexes files that I have worked on before. So, Windows 7 guesses that I would be interested in files that I worked on. Surely Windows 7 does not expect me to open all of my files individually before it indexes them !

So I first ensured the folder and file extension are included in Windows Search and then tried this trick – copy the folder to another folder and then copy them back to the original folder. This seemed to tell Windows 7 that I would be interested in those files and after a while, the search results I was expecting, starting turning up!

I guess I only have to do this because I brought in a whole lot of file before I configured Windows Search which folder to index (Refer to the various screenshots on how to configure folders and file types for indexing).