Follow this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/advquery.mspx
[EDIT: Moved to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965711(v=vs.85).aspx 
]
This should be included in Help and Support.
What is the syntax of Windows 7 file search (wildcards, logical signs...) ?__
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Anonymous
Hello,
I am looking for it everywhere but I can't find it.
When in Windows search and you are looking for a file, you can type in *.txt to look for a '.txt' file.
But it seems that the syntax of file name to look seems more complex that it looks first.
For instance, the quote character (") and the equal sign (=) seem to have there own significance.
And I think I have heard that it was possible to use 'not' and 'and ' signs.
Please, where can I find the complete syntax of the search paterns?
Thank you a lot
Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Files, folders, and storage
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
2011-02-18T23:02:26+00:00 On Fri, 18 Feb 2011 21:14:06 +0000, trippap wrote:
The trick is that you have to keywords. To search for files with extension .rss, you put extension:.rss into the Search box.
That works, but so does *.rss
Ken Blake (MS MVP)
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Anonymous
2011-02-18T23:24:55+00:00 > To search for files with extension .rss, you put extension:.rss into the Search box.
>> That works, but so does *.rss
...and so does ext:rss.
Noel
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Anonymous
2011-10-05T00:20:38+00:00 It's amazing that this hasn't been dealt with by Microsoft, either by adding list options to the search box or at least providing decent, findable, online documentation.
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Anonymous
2011-10-05T09:11:43+00:00 adding list options to the search box
With so many file properties/attributes available for searching, any selection box system would probably be even more confusing. You can see a selection (287 of them) of searchable attributes in Explorer by right-clicking on a column heading in Details view and then clicking More...
providing decent, findable, online documentation.
It looks as if many of the links given in this and other threads have broken. The syntax is pretty well described in this article: Advanced Query Syntax.
This blog post gives a quick introduction.
Noel