[jjeaff]

It has greatly improved over time with windows 10. Though I do still occasionally have the issue you are talking about. Wox launcher is an excellent replacement and with autohotkey you can replace the function of the windows key to launch wox instead. But windows 10 eventually got good enough that I stopped using wox.

For my first several years of using windows 10, search literally did not work at all. And it was apparently a pretty common and very difficult to solve problem according to online searches at the time. But they finally got their act together somewhat.

For searching for files, I still use "Everything".