How to search Windows 10 for ANY occurrence of a word?

I never heavily used the search feature on Windows 7, so I don't know if the issue persists on versions outside of 10.

I'm trying to search through a lot of files using Windows' file browser search function. The problem is, when I search for something, it only shows files with the keyword at the beginning of a word or immediately after an underscore.

For example, I search for the word "cat". These would be the results:

• Category.zip
• Picture of a Cat.jpg
• my_first_cat.txt

However, it wouldn't bring up words like "educational" or "application", because the keyword is in the middle of that word. Is there a way to search for all occurences of a keyword in Windows 10?

4 Answers

How to search Windows 10 for ANY occurrence of a word?

I'm trying to search through a lot of files using Windows' file browser search function. The problem is, when I search for something, it only shows files with the keyword at the beginning of a word or immediately after an underscore.

The Windows Explorer search function way. . .

• Press Windows Key + E
• Press Ctrl + F

• Type in *cat* in the search field and press Enter

  • Just put your keyword between two asterisks [*] *cat*

Open a command prompt in the folder, then type:

dir /s /b *cat* 

and replace cat with whatever you want. This will search all subdirectories of the current directory.

For a GUI based solution, I highly recommend using Agent Ransack for this purpose. I have not had much luck using the built-in search features of Windows since Windows 7, but Agent Ransack provides many more powerful options for searching the contents and names of files.

Windows search will only show you lists of prefix words so it is normal that it will show those lists of categories.