Windows 7: Search does not find files that it should, directory is indexed, and *.php included on the extension list

I have a similar problem.

In my folder with research papers, all papers are named systematicall "[year] [authors] [title].pdf".

When searching for [year], I never get the complete list of papers from that year. So 1 paper in the folder would be "2007 Johnson etcetera.pdf" and another (in the same folder) would be "2007 Smith something else.pdf", but search systematically only returns one of the two.

Creation date or file source does not seem to have an influence on which files are found and which are not. I tried everything that has been suggested here, to no avail.

After a fresh installation of Windows  7 Ultimate, I used the Control Panel/Indexing Options/Advanced dialog box to relocate the search index to a folder I created, i.e. C:\WindowsSearchIndex.  At the same time I specified a rebuild of the index.  Then I specified the folders to index, which in my case is all the folders below D:\MyName, since I have separated my data from the operating system and program files by putting it on a separate partition, D:.  I also specified another entire partition and some of the operating system and program folders. After I had done all that, it turned out that the Windows Search service had stopped, and I had to restart it using services.msc.  On reflection it might have been useful to turn the service off deliberately, to stop any system action during the resetting activities.

I then just let it get on with the indexing, and it has now completed indexing about 261,000 files, which I reckon is about right.  Searching now seems to bring up the expected results quite quickly (incidentally it seems better not to press the Enter key after typing in the search term, but just to let the search function get on with matching it).  The default format of the search results is not particularly useful, but it can be tweaked.   And the contents of the files, where applicable, are shown OK, even for PDF files,although I haven't tried searching for terms within a PDF (see comments about IFilters below).

You can download IFilters packs which enable indexing of the contents of Microsoft Office 2010 documents, e-mails etc., from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=17062

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=17062

Adobe also produce IFilters for Windows searches of PDFs' contents; apparently the IFilters plugin is bundled with Adobe Reader, so if you have that installed you already have the 32-bit IFilters.  The 64-bit version can be found here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025&promoid=DTEHN

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025&promoid=DTEHN

This should help with the problems with PDFs mentioned above.

Windows Search is actually quite sophisticated, but typically Microsoft has not bothered to document the search command syntax properly in the Help, or anywhere else that I can find.  Fortunately, a guide by Mike Halsey is available from his website as Part 5 of a free PDF book here: http://www.thelongclimb.com/books/win7powerfree.pdf.   This will help with searching for specific types of file, file date ranges, etc.

If you still don't get on with Windows Search, go to MythicSoft's website at:

http://mythicsoft.com/page.aspx?type=agentransack&page=home   or

http://mythicsoft.com/page.aspx?page=download&type=filelocatorlite

and download the free search tool Agent Ransack/File Locator Lite, which is fast and easy to use.

One or other of these search tools does the job for me;  I don't find the need for anything else.  I hope all this helps someone out.

it's now 2013 and windows 7 still can't find a file name that I know exists.  Should I still blame McAfee?

I disagree. The only reason you are seeing that is because of this product's failure.