windows 7 search in file contents - sometimes not found

Question

When searching for file contents using windows 7 search, as embedded in windows explorer :

If the file is textual but with extention name ".xml", search for contents that exists in the file, yield success for some of the words and yield no success for some of the others, however when filename extension is ".txt" then both yield success.

This is somewhat strange. Can anyone enlighten?

File contents example : <Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug</Configuration>

Try thus to search for the word "configuration" and separately for "condition", when this contents is in .xml extention filename and when in .txt extention filename, not same results in both cases... Why ?

Answer 1

Windows Search does not index ALL file types, it needs to be told which file types to index. The official Microsoft response is here:

Using the "A word or phrase in the file" search criterion may not work

If you're regularly searching text files I'd also recommend having a look at something like FileLocator Lite, which doesn't need any special settings to work.