Thanks, but that's not enough. The purpose of metatata tags (custom file
properties) is to allow documents to be tagged with a variety of different
identifiers so that people don't have to either cram all possible identifiers
into every file name (which is impractical for innumerable reasons) and
aren't limited to one logical folder hierarchy for categorizing files that
really need to be classified in several different ways.
Suppose I want to search all Proposal files generated in 2006 in Region 5
for any that involved Product A. Metadata search would enable me to establish
"2006" and "Region 5" and "Product A" as metadata tags, in proposal files
only. But even if I embed those values into the custom file properties of
certain documents, the new Windows Search would not only find those
particular documents, but it would also search all documents in the universe
that mention Product A in any way, in any context whatsoever, as well as
every document that has the digits "2006" anywhere in them, plus every
document that contains the word "Region", the digit "5", and the phrase
"Region 5"... bringing up thousands of irrelevant documents.
Unless I'm missing something, the new Windows Search doesn't let me specify
searching only the text within Word File Properties...so it's not much more
useful than Search Companion (except that it finds all that junk faster).
Acrobat Pro has a better system...it indexes all PDFs, but unlike windows
search, it not only finds and displays the file name; it also finds and
displays each occurrence of the search term within each document, and
displays those with surrounding text. And, if you click on an occurrence, it
opens the PDF of the .doc to the exact location and page, with the term
highlighted. If we are to depend on universal indexing of files for faster
search, we also need that kind of functionality to sort through the results.
