Exclude $ tf folder in Visual Studio Find and Replace

Question

Sometimes I have to do a text search across the entire workspace. This usually consisted of pressing Ctrl + Shift + F in Visual Studio, pointing it to the root of the workspace and pressing search.

Since the transition to TFS 2012 and the ability to switch to local workspaces, there is now a hidden $tf directory in the root directory of the workspace. Unfortunately, this directory is also crawled while performing a search that is slow and useless.

Is there a way for Visual Studio to ignore this directory, or is there some way to specify the $tf folder that should live elsewhere?

Reorganization of the project structure, so that the root of the workspace and the path that I need to look for, are different, unfortunately, are not an option.