Well, I don't need it either, but I clearly see why and how others do need it. At the moment, the industry goes towards search instead of manual structuring -- it's an interesting topic to think about, but that's a fact. Google tries everything to move people in this direction. You don't even need to look at the search engine, just think of how Google Maps or even Google Keep works. Menu entries, options, basically explicit filtering/search is transformed (dumbed down? maybe, maybe not) into a single search box where you tell it what you're looking for. When the most popular Linux distro integrates Amazon search into it's desktop search, then you know this has arrived. :)

Well, obviously it needs to be switchable, and it certainly will be both in Linux and in Windows. Not so much in Google OS, obviously.

Again, I'm not voicing my personal opinions and preferences on whether and how I want to see search integrated into a desktop OS. I'm arguing that Bing won't go away because the current industry trends require Microsoft to have a reasonably good search engine under its control.

Forgetting the location of a file is one use case. Another is that it's just convenient to type 'som' and have somefile pop up. Or to extract 500 similarly-named files from some program's convoluted directory structure. Frankly I'm surprised that we still store data resources as 'files' in rigid hierarchical databases after all these decades.

I don't find that convenient, I find it creepy.

If that's creepy, grep must be downright sinister.

Because grep really sends my data to an online service, right?

Neither does searching for a local file in the documents folder. I was referring to the "fascination with search in general" which can be invaluable when you have a lot of data shoehorned into directories or other inappropriate structures.

As for local searches commingling with online searches, there are some cases where it makes sense, others where it's a blatant violation of privacy, and many more in a subjective grey area. It's basically a matter of making sure people are informed (really informed, not small-print-in-the-legalese informed) and needing to opt in, not out.

>Neither does searching for a local file in the documents folder.

It does on Ubuntu/Mac OS.

>It's basically a matter of making sure people are informed... and needing to opt in, not out.

Shame nobody actually does this though. Also, does opting out actually stop the data grabbing, or just hide those results?

Search in the OS is killer, now tHe jury is out if that means I get a Wikipedia page, a definition for my search term, abriviated Google results AND the files on my disks that match my search term. For most of those, I'll always use search in a browser and not in my os.

Personally, I think that's just bad ux, it's simplification one step too far. The user might not want these search services to know they are searching for some terms. That's a distinction that I know many users clearly don't care about though.

Search is useful when you have shared folders that lots of people are working with. Unless you have very strict control everyones seperate mental models are mashed together into one big mess.