A great feature of Windows Vista’s search engine is its ability to understand natural language. Natural language support in Vista lets you search for things using language you’d use if you were talking to someone instead of computer mumbo-jumbo.

Unfortunately natural language support in Windows Vista’s search engine is turned off by default. This guide shows you how to turn it on and how to use it.

Learn how to turn on natural language search in Windows 7 ^[1] too.

Enable Natural Language Search

1. Open Computer in the Start menu.
2. Click Organize located at the top left of the Computer window and then select Folder and Search Options.
3. Click the Search tab and then check off Use natural language search.

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4. Click OK to save the changes.

Using Natural Language Search

When you search using natural language you ask the search engine a question similarly to how you’d ask a person.

Here are some examples:

• Searching for music: If you want to find all of the music by an artist you’d search for artist Marc Broussard. You could search for an album by searching album Carencro.
• Searching for e-mail: Search for e-mail from a person e-mail from Brent Trahan, or e-mail from Brent Trahan this month. Search for e-mail about a topic e-mail about Windows Vista.
• Searching documents: To search documents about a topic you would type document about Windows Vista.

Get creative and play with different search terms. You’ll be surprised at how well it works.