How does Google search the web in less than a second and return many results, but Windows File Explorer takes many seconds to search a relatively tiny amount of information?
In: 8
Google preprocesses its massive data set to be able to quickly filter down results according to your search string.
One simple way of doing this is to make a huge database of words, with links to every web page in which the word appears. Then when someone searches for a set of words, you can find the links that are common to all those words, and then from that much smaller list quickly return a ranked list of results.
This isn’t exactly what Google does, but it is analogous. The important part of the analogy is that this database, while smaller than the entire contents of the web, is still massive. Windows File Explorer could do this, but it would take time to create this and keep it updated, and it would take space to store it.
File Explorer [does do this](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/search-indexing-in-windows-10-faq-da061c83-af6b-095c-0f7a-4dfecda4d15a), but it balances search speed with other concerns. So depending on what you’re searching for and where in your filesystem you’re looking, you will not be taking advantage of this search index, and instead have to look through every file.
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