Classic Shell: Forum

Hi

How do I get the search box "search programs and files" (i.e. the one above the Start button) to sort the results within each section by DATE, rather than by name?

Note I do NOT mean the search top right in Windows Explorer, which fwiw, is already working nicely in date order!

Clue:
I have installed Classic Shell about a week ago, but I read a thread saying that it wont have touched this, nonetheless it was working fine a couple of weeks ago before I installed Classic Shell!

J

You cannot. The date is not available when the sorting takes place. The programs and settings are sorted somewhat by name, but the frequency of use and the closeness of the text match is also taken into account. The files are sorted by rank, which is a value computed by the search database and includes many factors.

I do not understand what you mean by your last "clue" sentence. What was working before you installed Classic Shell?

What I mean is that since about the time that I installed Classic Shell, that this Search facility has definitely become WORSE. i.e. much less useful.


Frequency of use? Interesting. How does it know this? Perhaps this using some data that CCleaner is destroying?

What "Search facility" has become worse? I thought you said that the search in Explorer is working fine.

If "Track frequency of use" is selected, every time you start a program from the start menu it is logged in the registry. Then that information is used to place those programs first in the list. The data is stored in the ItemRanks value in HKCR\Software\IvoSoft\ClassicStartMenu.

> What "Search facility" has become worse? I thought you said that the search in Explorer is working fine.

To get clear, what has become worse is the results from using the search box just above the Start button - you know the box that defaults to the pale grey words "Search programs and files". It's the one that searches as you type...
On my main computer and also on my laptop computer (on both of which I have recently installed Classic Shell) the results are almost totally bl**dy useless, because they are listed in pretty much filename order.

One problem is that I freely use 3 different computers to edit my files. Therefore it is insufficient for Windows to look at when my files were most frequently edited on any given computer!

One my Windows 8 PC it is particularly useless as even if I edit a file (e.g. a spreadsheet file) and save it to disk, Windows Search is *still* not putting it to the top of the list. Nightmare.
Perhaps Search has been changed to work differently on Windows 8 (??)

I now strongly suspect these are Windows problems rather than Classic Shell problems, but can you suggest any answers?
To get clear I just want Search to show me the most recently edited files... rather than age-old historic files. (Of course what doesnt help is that I have been 'foolish' enough to burn dates into many of my files and so I as things stand I always get the OLDEST files appearing first! Not helpful.)

Oh so by "has come worse", you mean the file search has become worse in Windows 8 compared to Windows 7? For Classic Shell's Start Menu, it only monitors the frequency of *programs* and *settings* launched from its own search box; it can't increment the count/frequency of what is launched from elsewhere, such as Explorer.

As Ivo said, files listed in the search results are sorted by rank which is a value computed by the search database (something Windows indexes and builds, Classic Start Menu merely queries it).

You can try this: Classic Start Menu offers some features to make it easy to access recent documents/files. Any recent files are listed in the 2nd column of the menu called "Recent Items". This is a Windows feature so any file you open by double clicking from Explorer will also show up there. You can sort that Recent Items menu by date, by extension (if Windows is set to show file extensions), or by name. On the Main menu tab, locate the setting called "Sort Recent Documents" and set it to what you want. There is also a "Max Recent Documents" setting to configure how many recent files you want to show.

One MORE thing you can do: since I do know specifically that Classic Shell's menu does not do this yet whereas the Windows 7 menu did was searching this Recent document list. Go to Control Panel -> Indexing Options. Click Modify -> Now add the 'Recent' folder to the search indexing. It's at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent. Once you add this folder to the index, Classic Start Menu will search your recent documents.

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and did Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

You seem to be using the start menu as a file browser. It is not a file browser. Windows Explorer is a file browser. It lets you get multiple search results and sort them in any order you want. You can multi-select, drag, drop, etc.

The search in the start menu is intended to find the file you are looking for and launch it. It is a text-based search. Whatever text you type is matched against the file name, metadata, or contents of the documents. If you are seeing too many results and your file is not there you have to continue typing until your file shows up. You can disable the search for metadata, leaving only search by name, which is more predictable.

On Windows 7 Classic Shell produces almost identical results with the Windows start menu. On Windows 8 there is no start menu to compare to, but the Classic Shell code is the same. If the quality of the search results is worse, that's probably because the indexing service is worse or you have not indexed the right locations.

What the issue seems to be as I understood is that on Windows 7, any files from Recent document list were returned in search results. By 'sorting', ship691 means prioritizing those files in results if I understood correctly, however CSM doesn't return recent documents at all. So adding the Recent folder to Indexing Options should fix the issue.

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and did Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

OK now I am completely confused.

To recap the basics:

A. Windows 7
In plain vanilla Window 7 (without Classic Shell installed) there is a circular button bottom left of the screen. It has the Windows logo on it. You mouse over it and its says "Start". This is I presume the "Start Button", yes?(!)
Now, when you left-click on this button up pops a menu, and at the bottom of the menu, immediately above the Start Button, is a white box with no writing in it. As soon as you start typing, the menu options above it disappears and you immediately get results appearing within the popup above it. On my old work PC which has vanilla Windows 7 installed, these results are in different sections (e.g. "Control Panel" , "Outlook" , "Files") and within each section the results are already sorted into what appears to be most recently edited item first.

To get clear I do NOT wish to discuss the search box that appears top right when you open Windows Explorer (which fwiw, seems to work in a very different and much slower way, and which has a column called "Date modified" which can be used to sort results. Also the search results you get depend on which folder you have got selected in the left hand navigation window...).

B. Classic Shell
After you install Classic Shell the above "Start Button" is replaced by different button with a clam shell on it. When you mouse over it, it says "Start" too. When you left click on it, again you get a window popping up with a menu of various stuff, and immediately above this new "Start Button" is a search box. This time it does have (pale grey) writing in it saying "Search Programs and files".

So, I have installed Classic Shell onto both my (Windows 7 x64) home PC and my new (Windows 8 x64) laptop.
When I type into this search box on either of these computers, it immediately replaces the menu items above the search box (as happens in vanilla Windows 7) and it immediately starts showing search results. However in the window does not seem to work in the same way as it does in vanilla Windows 7. The most irritating thing is that within each section, it is always the OLDEST (i.e. likely to be the least relevant) rather than the most recent items that are listed first.

And please dont tell me to "keep typing" - that's just plain ignorant!

For example, if I am looking for my accounts spreadsheet file for this year, I want to be able to type "accounts" and have it appear at the top of the list. I do NOT want my account file from 10 years ago appearing first. Worse, off the top of my head I simply can't think of any other keywords that only this years accounts file would contain.

And the same is true of emails. If I type in say "Bart Smith", I dont want to see some email from Bart that I received ten years ago! No, the chances are that I want to see what he and I are discussing this week!
The point is that search utilities are all about convenience and saving time. And always listing the search results it the oldest first is almost always bl**dy inconvenient.


MY QUESTIONS:
1. Does the Classic Shell have its own separate searching facility or is it simply using the default Windows search (as described in "A." above)
2. If Classic Search is using the default Windows search, is it doing anything to it?

If not then maybe this entire thread is in the wrong forum(!), but while I'm here, please can anyone tell me where/how I can change the sort order of results within each section?

I see your point. I'll look into it.

I did some test searches on Windows 7 and compared the results of the Files section and indeed as ship691 says, the results in the Windows 7 menu are sorted by the *date modified* property whereas CSM was sorting it was by the name property. In addition to that, even if the recently modified file was not in a location which was indexed, it showed up in the original Windows 7 menu's search because it was part of Recent Items folder, whereas CSM omitted that. The final results were sorted by date modified in WSM, and by name in CSM. Kudos to ship691 for observing and telling us that the Files section is sorted by date.

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and did Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

Ah-ha! So it's not just me going mad... Thank you, Gauravk - Kudos accepted. :^)

This change to the order of search results is seriously irritating and almost enough to cause me to uninstall Classic Shell completely. Is there nothing we can do? Not even if we mess with the Windows Registry...?

Have patience please. Ivo said he is looking into it. Surely, you can wait for a few days to give him time to look into it?

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and did Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

No, there is nothing you can do on your end. The order is determined by the SQL query, which is hard-coded in Classic Shell. You can't override it from the registry.

Drattt. I don't know about anyone else but I find it inconvenient almost every time I look for a file.


What's the way forward on this?

@ship691, try the latest version of Classic Shell. The file search results are now sorted by date modified. Communication results are sorted by date received. Does that solve your problem?

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and did Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

My initial reaction was "I think by George he's done it!"

However I am still testing. It is still producing rather unexpected results so I rebuilt the index on in fact both my Win7 and my Win8 PC.

One thing that seems to happen is that if I open a spreadsheet file, modify and save it. Instead of being at the top of the list, it is still at where it was in the list. OR it will have disappeared completely from the list (!). But if you come back a minute or so later suddenly it is where it should be at the top of the list. Is this a feature of how MS Search indexing works?(!)

If so then this works perfectly.

Brilliant - many thanks

J

PS. You have introduced a new problem though - which is that when I right-click on any filename the menu of options that pops up is very pale grey and effectively un-readable, until such time as I move my mouse to do a mouse-over on the popup area. Is this something I can fix myself?

Indexing has always took time. No computer can index a million files in a blink of an eye. So it is expected for any changes to the files to take a bit of time before they show in the index.

I don't know what you mean by "pale grey". A screenshot would be helpful.

If the location where you are changing/editing documents is not indexed, then they may not show up still in Classic Shell's search. This wasn't the case in the Windows 7 Start Menu, where any recently edited documents WILL show up because it searches the shell:Recent folder.

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and did Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

Sorry my unclear: "pale grey" means "extremely transparent"... until you do a mouse over.


OK please see the attached (taken with mobile phone because hitting any key removes the popup so normal screenshots are impossible!). Windows 7 Pro (x64).

It seems to have affected almost all menus on my computer including some any popup menus within applications.
To get clear I would be very happy to get rid of ALL transparency!

Many thanx

J


P.S. This problem doesnt seem to have affected my Win 8 computer onto which I have also installed Classic Shell 4.0.2.

Ok I think I have just solved the problem. On the Performance Options menu in Windows 7, I unticked a couple of options "Fade or slide menus into view" and "Fade or slide tooltips into view".

To get clear - I have NOT been fiddling with any such settings recently so, FWIW I do still suspect that version 4.0.2 introduced this problem.

With thanks

J

Classic Shell does not affect other Windows behaviors other than putting a Start Menu or what the Explorer/IE addons say they do. It may be your display drivers which are responsible.

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and did Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

Really? OK. I don't think I changed anything else but maybe something managed to install itself without my permission. Meanwhile I've just updated my display adapter drivers just to make sure.