First of all, I’m not a MIcrosoft basher.

I’m not even a big foe of Microsoft.  I made a good living from programming with Microsoft products for years in the ’80’s and ’90’s, and I don’t like to bite the hand that fed me.

But, more than that, there are Microsoft tools I’ve liked, some I’ve loved, and some I still love (Excel, yes, and Word too).

However, Microsoft search, almost across the entire company, is terrible.  Bing search is inferior.  Visual Studio search is impossible.  Desktop search didn’t work well at all.  Windows 8/10 search is very very lame.

With one exception, perhaps: as I wrote here, I’ve moved off of Evernote back to OneNote, and OneNote search is pretty darn good.

First of all, it’s better than Evernote search.

Evernote search is quirky and clunky.  I type in a word that’s in the text and in a tag, and then when I click on the tag (thinking I’ll get all the results with that tag) I inexplicably get nothing at all.  I have to go back and say “search by tag” and then scroll down and find the tag and click on it.  I don’t get it.

In OneNote, you type in a word, you get a list of pages grouped by salience (at the top are pages with the search term in a title, then in the body, then in less-visited places (Recycle bin, Misplaced sections, etc.).  You click on a search result and you go to that page.  Take a note from OneNote, guys at Evernote.  It doesn’t have to be clunky.