This system no doubt sits on years of dusty debt, but really how hard can it be?

There are literally dozens of third party search/launch apps that are better.

I don’t know what kind of matching it uses but it’s not good. Is it prefix only? Is it case sensitive? What metadata is used in the match (what is displayed as a program name or something else)?

If I started writing a simple indexer app with an SQLite file and a little search box I’d have something more useful for finding apps after one afternoon.

So what exactly is the Windows search trying to do that I’m not considering, that makes it so hard that it fails with the trivial stuff like text matching?