zabkat support forum

here's the comment area for today's blog post found at
http://zabkat.com/blog/find-blacklist.htm

Nikos wrote:The more unwanted folders you blacklist, the less time xplorer² will waste in pointless searches.

Indeed, except this isn't the way humans conceive of their filesystems - we think of them ecumenically.

What would be more useful than outright banning, would be a means of prioritising certain locations for searching.  For example, if I want to find certain DLL's on my system but I'm not entirely sure where they are (but I do know where they aren't) I unfortunately have to sit there and watch the status bar telling me it's wandering around C:\Windows when I know damn well what I want isn't there.

"So what?" I hear you say, "Either exclude the Windows folder, or don't search a drive from its root!"

The trouble is, I find it much more practical to search the whole system when looking for something because (like what used to happen back when people used physical dictionaries to look up words) you never know what kind of stuff you might find.  So by no means do I want to ban the Windows folder (that would be silly), I just don't want it searched until I've already gone through the location where what I want is more likely to be located (unless, of course, I targeted it specifically).

Yes, we have the Depth vs. Breadth option, but that doesn't really take the whole filesystem in consideration - that's more of a summer squall than a proper search hurricane.

So I vote for looking at the whole forest first, before worrying about pruning the trees - otherwise you'll miss the beauty of the autumn light.

what i'm working on right now for the ultimate version is access to windows search from within xplorer2, that should offer a lot of speed increase albeit at the expense of accuracy

Funny, you just edited the blog post to remove a line where you had "dissed" desktop search 20 minutes ago , which I assumed meant you ruled that idea out, since you were on the fence about it.

Thought you could slip that by me, eh?   (Where's Google Cache when you need it...)

WDS is very good, e.g. try typing some characters in w7 start menu search box and you will see. The problem is that it is not very reliable but it can be used as a quick first attempt, followed by robust search with xplorer2 if it fails in one of its many ways (e.g. it can't find symbols, only full words)

I think it's good to have a blog post to draw attention to the blacklist and how to empty it completely, as you probably know I struggled very recently with this problem, so thanks for creating the post and video.

My personal opinion is that the AppData is a place I quite commonly want to search so really disagree with the logic that puts this in the blacklist by default. If the thinking is really that "people wouldn't need to search in there for their[\i] documents" then I think this could maybe use a rethink.

One of the biggest problems is that loads of files that pertain to a user's settings that may not be "their documents" that they themselves have placed there.

For example, where is your Outlook mailbox? It's a PST file in AppData somewhere, so why not user xplorer2 to find its actual location? Aha, unlucky, it won't work by default, because of the blacklist.

Where is the file that just got created/saved in %TEMP%? Quick search? Not if you have the blacklist as this is in AppData.

Mozilla Firefox stores your profile settings here so forget searching for your bookmarks files with the default blacklist. The same is true for your Thunderbird mail. Temporary internet files, the list just goes on and on.

I hope I have managed to convey my point! Perhaps there are counter-examples that I haven't thought of but this is definitely the number one 'feature' of xplorer2 I would change if I could!

I add these general locations to my blacklist (with parenthetical comments )  IMHO these especially apply for content searches.

A. Highly volatile directory trees
   1. Index directories currently being used by *any* search product
       for me, these are Windows DTS, Copernic and X1 Professional
   2. Cache directories for browsers - especially if you've customized
   3. Application path temp/working directories (e.g. Photoshop, compilers)
B. Mostly useless for any search
   1. Large media file directories (e.g. a DV 1 hour tape at 720p takes about
       13.5 GiB. Why search all the files there when you are likely to use
       lots of real estate but little internal info for searching.
   2. Windows backup targets on disk
   3. Other large scale static storage locations (e.g. an ISO collection)
C. 'Doh locations
   You've mapped a large directory (say like Install masters) to a drive letter. Probably want to exclude the directory on the original side and search only the mapped drive.

That's my idea and I'm sticking to it.

/s/ Bezantsoft  8)