Anil suggests using a RAM disk as a solution to Windows’ shabby ‘find’.
Well yes and no – sure you want to have your search index in RAM, accessing RAM is 1000 times faster than disk access, but the main problem with Windows is the lack of a decent searchable index in the first place.
The Longhorn version of windows will have full text search built properly into the filesystem. By the time that Microsoft release this, XML databases, or even better, graph based databases may make their efforts appear to be already out of date. A filesystem index is a perfect application for a native XML database.