If you have ever typed a file name into Windows Search but stopped midway because you only remembered part of it, Microsoft has something for you. 

In its latest Windows 11 Insider Preview build, Microsoft has added a focused but genuinely useful improvement to the way Windows Search finds your files. It is one of those fixes that makes me wonder why it took so long. 

What is Search by Substring and why does it matter?

Released on May 29 to both the Experimental and Beta channels, the new feature is called Search by Substring, and what it does is quite simple. 

Previously, looking for a file in Windows required you to enter the beginning of its name. So, typing “april” would not surface a file called MeetingNotesApril, simply because Windows was not looking inside more complex file names. 

Search by Substring changes that for good. Type “april” and Windows will now return files whose names contain that string anywhere, whether at the start, end, or middle. 

The same applies to content within files. Type “status” and a document called ProjectStatusReport becomes discoverable immediately.

Is this actually a big deal?

For anyone who stores files with descriptive compound names, people working in documents, project folders, or any kind of organized file system, yes, the new Search by Substring feature surely is a big deal. 

The old behavior forced you to remember exactly how a file started, which is not how human memory works, added comma before. This is a small fix with a a disproportionately large quality-of-life impact.

The Search by Substring improvement is available in the Experimental channel with Build 26300.8553 and in the Beta channel with Build 26220.8544. In the same build, Microsoft has added Start menu improvements including section-level toggles, a renamed Recommended section now called Recent, and size options for the Start menu itself.

The mall is making a comeback.

As younger people return to American shopping malls in greater numbers, a startup called “The Mall” is bringing the concept online with an app that lets users create a personalized virtual mall from their favorite brands and track sales in one place.

The idea itself is simple, if not novel. But its arrival now feels more timely, as customers face an increasingly fragmented online shopping landscape that has become harder to keep up with their favorite brands.

That challenge is what first inspired The Mall’s co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker, whose background includes working at companies like Tom Ford and Karla Otto. At her first startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace, Konsker spotted a larger issue in the fashion and marketing space.

“Consumers were shopping across 20 tabs at once, signing up [their] emails for newsletters, and trying to be able to track brands and piece all that information together in real time,” Konsker said. “It’s hard, and it makes shopping a very frustrating process.

Konsker connected with co-founder and CEO Sreya Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford, as part of a female founders circle in Los Angeles.

“We were both super aligned on creating this world where everyone has access to all of the brands that exist on the internet,” noted Halder. “As a founder, I was looking at other apps — like Letterboxd, Goodreads, Spotify — and they’ve created these databases for all of those creative outlets — for music, movies, books. And fashion, and shopping, didn’t actually exist, so we started out wanting to build [something] like a Spotify, but for shopping,” she said.

The pair founded The Mall in October 2025, with a focus on bringing together fashion brands under one digital roof.

Instead of partnering with brands or using APIs, The Mall uses technology to scrape retail websites, pulling in entire catalogs, and tracking product and pricing information within its own app. This scraping is frequent enough to keep an eye out for sales, restocks, drops, and other promotions, which it then alerts users to via push notifications.

At launch, users create their own virtual mall by adding their favorite brands upon signing up, which allows them to immediately track any changes. While The Mall’s current database includes more than 10,000 brands, consumers can add any other brand they want, simply by sharing the brand’s Instagram or TikTok account. (The Mall will determine if there’s a matching e-commerce site and then scrape its catalog, adding those items to its database.)

On the back end, the startup uses LLMs (large language models) and its own custom models to label everything it pulls into its system, which allows users to search for specific products and drops.

When users are ready to buy, a browser page opens inside the app, taking users to the brand’s e-commerce site to check out. There’s no traditional affiliate model involved here, the company says. Instead, The Mall is meant to work more as a discovery tool.

As users build their collections of brands, they can choose to have them discoverable by others or kept private. The founders see the potential for this to work as a discovery tool among friends and among people who follow creators for their fashion sense.

“As you dig in, you’ll end up going down this rabbit hole and finding more and more things from brands that you never would have seen or heard of unless they delivered an ad to you,” Konsker noted.

Users can also discover possible lower-priced alternatives to specific products, she said. “You can look at a piece and then see what is similar to this piece across any brand in the world. So you can see if a piece is priced a little bit lower or higher in different colorways,” Konsker added.

The Mall is a free app for consumers. The company plans to make money by building a data tool for brands that will allow them to analyze their clicks, look at how other brands are thinking about their seasonal assortments, and help them plan.

“Over time, we see those two paths crossing, where once we have enough shoppers on our consumer product, then it becomes a really great advertising platform for brands to have sponsored billboards and…weekly or monthly subscriptions, where they show up in these recommendations and in your feed,” Halder said.

This B2B product is expected to launch later this summer. Data shared with brands is anonymous and aggregated. It doesn’t contain personal details, the founders confirmed.

The Mall has been in early beta testing with 4,500 testers and is now launching on an invite-only referral basis as it slowly scales. (If you know someone with access, they can invite you. There isn’t a set number of invites per user.)

The Mall should be broadly available by the end of the summer. The app is currently a free download on the App Store.