Windows 8 In Depth

Using Advanced Query Syntax to Search Properties

When you run a standard text search from any Search box, Windows looks for matches not only in the filename and the file contents, but also in the file metadata: the properties associated with each file. That’s cool and all, but what if you want to match only a particular property. For example, if you’re searching your music collection for albums that include the word Rock in the title, a basic search on rock will also return music where the artist’s name includes rock and the album genre is Rock. This is not good.

To fix this kind of thing, you can create powerful and targeted searches by using a special syntax—called Advanced Query Syntax (AQS)—in your search queries.

For file properties, you ...