If you ever wanted to search something that is on your Windows Phone, like documents, music file etc, there wasn’t a direct way to do it till now. Windows 10 for Phones Preview includes a Search App which is like universal search service which can find documents, music, images and videos residing on your phone. This is very close to what we have seen with the search box in Windows for Desktop.

This is nothing but Cortana. To start using it, look for a search app in the app list or hit the search button. Now lets say you have document name as “Test.docx”. Type Test in the search box and it should list it right on the top & above web results. In case you don’t see anything listed, scroll down a little and look for option which says “Search my stuff” to initiate local search.

When you do that, you get a second pane which lists only local search with 4 tabs, Documents, Photos, Videos and Music. Even if Cortana is not enabled on your phone, this works just fine. You can directly launch the file in its app. So word document opens in Office, Music can be played directly and image opens in Photo App.

Like always, this is preview and not a final version. There are lags, frame skips everywhere. So try this and see how it works on your phone and send feedback to Microsoft so they can improve it.