Patent ID: 8626734

Claim:
A computerized method of locating and opening a file on a computer, said computer including an index containing metadata associated with one or more files stored on the computer or on an external source, said metadata identifying a type of each of the one or more files, said method comprising: initiating a current application on the computer; initiating a desktop search application on the computer, said initiating the desktop search application comprising: displaying to a user of the computer a persistent first user interface (UI) element that is persistently available to a user of the computer by being located in an operating system shell of an operating system of the computer, said persistent first UI element including a search field for receiving a user-entered dynamically modifiable search term, said search term comprising one or more characters representative of a file to be opened on the computer, said search term being dynamically modifiable as the user enters additional characters, wherein each file is indexed according to the file type identified in the metadata associated with the file; dynamically modifying the user-entered dynamically modifiable search term as the user enters one or more search operators to the search term; dynamically defining a scope of the index of files to be searched based on the user-entered dynamically modifiable search term, wherein the scope of the index is dynamically modified as the one or more search term search operators are dynamically modified; in response to the received dynamically modifiable search term, dynamically searching the index of files by file type, as identified by the metadata associated with each file, and based on the defined scope of the index according to the dynamically modified search term; generating search results in response to searching the metadata associated with each file based on the dynamically modified search term, said generated search results having a plurality of files having a plurality of types; dynamically filtering the generated search results according to each type of file listed in the search results; and displaying a second UI element associated with the first persistent UI element, said second UI element including a window for displaying the filtered search results based on the scope of the index, said second UI element receiving user input to select the file to be opened from the filtered search results, and wherein said computer is responsive to said user input via the second UI element for opening the selected file.