FINDRA
Coming soon
FINDRA

WINDOWS SEARCH.
BUT IT WORKS.

Type one word. Findra gives you the photo that looks like it, the document that says it and the recording where somebody said it - and not one of them has it in the filename.

Coming soon See what it finds
Windows 10 and 11 / Apache-2.0 / No account, because we do not want to know you
Findra's results card answering a search for sunset: a photograph matched on what it shows, documents matched on their text, and a recording matched on what was said
TICKET #3036 · OPEN SINCE 1996 · NOW CLOSED

WE FIXED WINDOWS SEARCH.
YOU'RE WELCOME.

You bought a drive that reads seven thousand megabytes a second. Windows uses it to think about your question for four minutes, freeze a folder you were not looking in, find nothing, and then gently suggest that the internet might know where you keep your own tax return.

Findra holds the file table in RAM and answers before your finger comes off Enter. Half a millisecond, measured, on a disk with 1.5 million files on it.

Coming soon See what it finds
Windows 10 and 11 / Apache-2.0 / No account, because we do not want to know you
THE PAPER TRAIL

Thirty years, five log entries

Windows kept meticulous records of everything except where your file was.

Event Viewer Applications and Services / Windows Search 5 events, one of them useful
LEVELEVENTSOURCEDESCRIPTION
Error 3036 SearchIndexer Indexed 1,842,910 files overnight. Excluded the desktop for reasons known only to itself.
Error 1000 explorer.exe Faulting application. Took the taskbar with it so you would not feel alone.
Warning 7043 SearchProtocolHost Drive at 100% for six minutes. Twenty-three cores idle and watching.
Warning 0042 SearchUI Could not find a local file. Offered eleven web results and a shopping tab.
Resolved 0001 findra.exe Found it in half a millisecond. Also found it quoted inside three PDFs and a voice note. Went back to using 73 MB.
THE OFFICIAL EXCUSES

Why it did not find your file

The index had not got to it

You saved the file. The indexer runs at 3 AM. Until then, as far as Windows is concerned, you did not.

Findra: names are live, always

That folder was not included

There is a settings page listing which of your own drives Windows is willing to look at. Nobody has ever found it twice.

Findra: every NTFS volume

You only remembered the sentence

Not what you called the file. Windows would like the filename, please, and would prefer you had it memorised.

Findra: inside documents too

It sent the question upstream

You typed a private filename into a box on your own computer and something went over the wire about it.

Findra: nothing leaves
WHAT IT FINDS

Names first. Then, if you ask, everything else.

Names cost seconds to index and about 73 MB of memory, so they are on from the moment Findra starts. Reading inside files walks every drive and can run for hours, so it never begins on its own. You turn it on, one capability at a time, and each one is a separate download you can decline.

What you can search for Needs a model On by default
Names of files and folders, across every NTFS volumenoyes, the moment Findra starts
Words in documents, and the text inside picturesnono, until you turn content indexing on
Photos and video, by what is in the frameyesno
Documents by what they mean, not only the words they useyesno
Speech in recordings, with a second pass for Hebrewyesno

Everything Findra can install adds up to 2.93 GB, and that is the figure only if you take all of it. Take none and it still searches every name on the machine. Sizes on screen are marginal, counted against what you have already picked, because Speech and Meaning share files and you are never charged twice for the same download.

NOT A MOCKUP

Every picture below is the product

Each one was drawn by the same painter the window uses, with the command printed underneath it. Run the command, get the image.

The Findra results card showing nine results for the query sunset, with a photo previewed beside them

The card

Nine results for "sunset": files by name, documents by their contents, and a photograph matched on what is actually in the frame.

findra --searchshot results.png results Mond
The Findra capsule sitting on the desktop, waiting

The capsule

It sits on the desktop doing nothing until you click it, or press the hotkey from wherever you happen to be.

findra --searchshot capsule.png capsule Mond
The same results card rendered in the light Blueprint palette

Six palettes, three dark and three light

Pick one of each and Findra follows the Windows setting, or pin it to either. Your own go in palettes.json.

findra --searchshot light.png results Blueprint
The advanced search form with a query built up from its fields

The grammar, with a form

Typing has a syntax. There is a form for the parts of it nobody remembers, and it writes the query for you.

findra --searchshot advanced.png adv Mond
The first-run screen with the Recommended preset chosen

One question, then out of the way

Take a preset, take one capability, or take nothing at all. Nothing on this screen is permanent.

findra --searchshot firstrun.png firstrun Paper
The Content section of Findra's settings window, showing the switch for reading inside files

Reading inside your files is a switch, and it starts off

One number, in minutes, decides how long a recording is worth transcribing. Turning content indexing off later throws away nothing already read, and turning a capability on re-reads only the files that capability covers.

findra --searchshot settings.png settingscontent Paper
THE NUMBERS

Measured, on a named machine, by a command you can run

Everything below came out of findra --searchbench and was pasted without editing. No number appears on this page that you cannot reproduce on your own computer with one command.

0.50 ms A name, end to end Median round trip for "config", pipe hop included. Slowest query measured was 3.99 ms.
2.8 s From cold to ready 1,573,675 names enumerated off the volume at sign-in. No overnight pass, no 3 AM.
73.1 MB What it costs to hold The whole resident name index for that million and a half files.
0 Bytes about your files No account, no cloud, no analytics, no crash reporting, no telemetry.
Name query Round trip p50 Round trip p95 Index scan p50 Worst Hits
config0.50 ms0.54 ms0.06 ms0.56 ms50
report0.54 ms0.61 ms0.16 ms1.31 ms50
readme1.00 ms1.06 ms0.51 ms1.33 ms50
invoice2.53 ms5.04 ms2.13 ms5.42 ms45
sunset3.99 ms4.43 ms3.55 ms5.20 ms35
Machine AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D RAM 47.1 GB Disk NVMe SSD OS Windows 11 Pro 10.0.26200.9168 Accelerator ONNX via DirectML Build Findra 0.1.0 Samples n=50 per query

A number without its machine is marketing rather than measurement, so the machine is named. Yours will differ. Findra tries DirectML for the vision and meaning models and Vulkan for speech, and falls back to the processor when neither answers, which is a supported configuration rather than a failure: only the first pass through your files is slower, and findra --searchmodels prints which provider it chose and every one it turned down, with reasons.

WHAT LEAVES YOUR MACHINE

One request. Written down, not buried.

Never leaves

  • Your files, and their contents
  • Their names, and where they live
  • What you searched for, and when
  • Anything at all about who you are

There is no account, no cloud service, no analytics, no crash reporting and no telemetry. The models run on your own processor or graphics card; a photograph is never uploaded to be understood.

The one exception

Once every 24 hours, on startup, in the background, Findra makes an anonymous HTTPS GET to the GitHub releases API to learn whether a newer version exists. No query parameters, no machine identifier, no install identifier, nothing about your files or your searches.

It never blocks anything, a failure is a line in the log rather than a dialog, it is disclosed on the first-run screen, and you can switch it off. Off means the request is not made at all.

Findra never installs an update by itself. Replacing a running executable and re-registering an elevated task are the two operations most likely to leave a machine broken, and it declines to do either behind your back.

INSTALL

Get Findra

Findra is at version 0.1.0 and the first release has not been tagged yet, so building it yourself is the route that works today. It needs the .NET 10 SDK and nothing else.

WORKS TODAY

Build it from source

Four commands, and you have a self-contained build. The tests run on your machine too.

$ git clone https://github.com/blakazulu/findra $ cd findra $ dotnet build $ dotnet publish src/Findra -c Release --self-contained

Name search needs the helper, which asks for administrator rights exactly once, to open the volume. Nothing else in Findra ever needs them, and the part that reads your files deliberately runs without them.

$ dotnet run --project src/Findra -- --names
Source on GitHub
WITH THE FIRST RELEASE

Installer and winget

The installer is written and the winget manifests are already in the repository, for both x64 and arm64. When the first release is tagged, this is the whole install.

>winget install blakazulu.FindraCOPY

Neither the installer nor the executables are signed yet, so Windows will warn about an unknown publisher until that changes.

Removing it, whenever you like

Uninstalling always removes the elevated logon task, because a scheduled task pointing at a binary that is no longer there is a defect and not an inconvenience. It keeps your models, your index and your settings unless you say otherwise, and tells you the measured size it would free before it deletes anything.

$ findra --uninstall --dry-run

Close the ticket.

Names in half a millisecond from the moment you sign in. Documents, photos and speech when you ask for them, and not a second sooner. No account, no telemetry, no 3 AM index rebuild, and a licence that lets you take the whole thing apart.

Coming soon
$git clone github.com/blakazulu/findraCOPY
Windows 10 and 11 · x64 and arm64 · Apache-2.0