Search Monkey

Despite some useful tips and tricks, Windows Search has often fallen short of expectations. If you frequently need to locate files on your PC, relying solely on the embedded search may slow you down and disturb your workflow. This is where Search Monkey steps in as a valuable alternative.

The interface is far from the Fluent style, most of us got used by now. In fact, the UI is reminding me of legacy Java-based programs and can sometimes feel a little sluggish, even though my laptop exceeds the system requirements.

If you manage to get past the looks, you will discover a nice tool to help you find various files on your drives. To get started, you need to type in a keyword or specify the file extension you’re looking for. To narrow your query, you can also include mime type, size, modified, created or accessed dates.

I used a very general term on a medium size folder and got my results in just a few     seconds. The files are displayed with the icon of the program that you can open them with, which is a nice touch.

It is disappointing that the app doesn’t seem to recognize numerous extensions, but I could work with that. I can preview some file types directly in the app, without having to waste time opening the files.

As with other similar tools, it’s best to take the time and fine-tune the app’s settings so that you get as accurate results as possible. From the Options tab, you can configure the app to ignore files that are regularly irrelevant for your query, such as, shortcuts, symbolic links or skip binary and hidden files altogether.

Depending on your work style and preferred file management, Search Monkey lets you enable and disable case-sensitive searches and specify if you want to disable 3rd party content searching as well as Unicode detection algorithm.