Windows 8 In Depth

Searching via the Start Screen

If you use your PC regularly, there’s an excellent chance that its hard drive is crammed with thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of files that take up hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of gigabytes. That’s a lot of data, but it leads to a huge and growing problem: finding things. Everyone wants to have the proverbial information at their fingertips, but these days our fingertips tend to fumble around more often than not, trying to locate not only documents and other data we’ve created ourselves, but also apps, Windows settings, and that wealth of information that exists “out there” on the Web, in databases, and so on.

Windows 8 attempts to solve this problem by combining all search operations into a single ...