Unfortunately it was always slow in Vista, and not as well implemented as Spotlight. To me, spotlight is the shining light of my mac.

Is the Win8 search faster and does it have a better design? I haven't heard anything about it.

It works better in Win 7 than Vista, but still not as good as OSX or Unity. The Windows 8 version looks nice, but I don't know yet how good the final version is. If it works well it will probably make people like the new full screen start menu a lot more.