I've been having an interesting time with Windows Search lately. A typical example is that I'll open Windows explorer, go to the documents library, search for a .docx file by its name, and it won't appear in the list of results. I can see that it's there, and it should have been picked up by search, but it isn't.

If I conduct the same search in the start menu, then I'll get hundreds of results under "documents", but a few under the heading "files", including the one that won't appear via a search in explorer. This started happening a couple of months back I think, never used to.

Despite a bit of googling, I cannot figure out for the life of me what the distinction is in Windows Search between "documents" and "files", presumably due in some part to them being such common search terms and typically interchangeable.

I managed to fix the problem by moving the file to another disk, then putting is back into the documents library, whereupon Windows Search suddenly woke up to its existence, and now it's considered a "Document". But I still have no idea what's going on, and it seems to keep happening.