Windows search how does it work




















There was. Everyone wrote to files in their own format that was easy to understand by their application and no one else. This worked fine at the time — your Adobe application opened your PDFs, internet browsers opened your html files, and photo applications opened your. When the indexing service came along it was designed to understand these different file types and make the data inside of them searchable across the system and all applications for quick, and efficient access.

Over the course of these 29 years the service has evolved into what is the backend for a lot of Windows experiences, as well as a handful of developer APIs and their applications. The indexing service Index Server 2. This enabled users to search for text on web pages that were being hosted on an IIS server. The concept of Filters was also introduced for the first time, allowing for the extraction of text-based content from different file types to be written into the indexing service. These filters were a way for an application to register themselves with a given file extension that the indexing service would invoke to grab the content to be put in the index when processing that file.

Have you ever cracked open a. PDF file in notepad? Do you have any idea what the below data means? What if I told you there was a way to find a PDF on your system with some specific text in it without having to browse your entire OneDrive collection? Blindly opening a file like the above is not a very useful way to process this data for the purpose of searching, nor does it make much sense to me. This is what the indexing service would see to extract data from without the appropriate filter.

Filters became a way for a specific file format to communicate the data in that file that is valued as searchable. With an IFilter for. How did applications read the index? From the beginning there was an OLEDB indexing service provider that provided read-only access to the contents in the index. All of these APIs are still available today for developers and applications to use.

The indexing service shipped for the first time as part of the operating system with Windows , however it was a Windows Component and Service that you needed to enable. In Windows the Indexing service indexed file content. Users could then search the Indexer, and eventually find the file via the Query Form in the Management Console. Aside from the fact that you could search items, the service also exposed various statistics to the user to understand what is happening under the covers.

These statistics are the columns you see in the Computer Management UI below. Many more continue to be added and still worked on today. The USN Journal is a component of the file system which gave applications the ability to read all changes on any volume in the system assuming journals were supported on that volume and react to those changes accordingly.

IFilters were also really starting to pick up with more third parties developing them to support content for unique file types to use within their applications.

Popular filters at the time were the. Above shows content indexing in action on Windows XP. The obvious is that the search boxes will all disappear from your desktop.

Any program that relies on the Windows Search Service might have functionality issues eg. Internet Explorer , and indexing will be removed from the Control Panel. If this is something you would still like to try, then you should learn the proper way to disable the Windows Search Service:.

Once these steps are followed you will notice that the Search Box will be gone from the start menu. With Windows 8 or Windows 10 it is more about disabling the indexing, and as such, requires a different set of steps. Now you know what exactly the Windows Search Service is, where you can find it, and how to disable it. Date: Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Email is an excellent communication method. It has become a ubiquitous part of daily life since it became widespread in the mids. Improving the. Although desktop virtualization has become much simpler and more commonplace as virtualization technologies have evolved, it still poses some difficulties that can be a huge stumbling block for many companies.

While some of. Subscribe to the Lookeen newsletter to get the latest updates and content first. Where to find Windows Search Over the years, Microsoft has made some changes to where the Windows Search Service is located, and has improved its functionality. Please note: in some cases it requires a reboot for the changes to work. Also, searches in the contents of pdf files can only work if the pdf files are actually searchable. The type of pdf files that are stored as an image, cannot be searched.

To check whether or not your pdf file is searchable, open up the pdf file and try selecting a piece of the text with your mouse, as illustrated in this image:. If you found this article helpful, please take a moment and leave a short comment below. Also, if you want to be informed about new articles and updates before anyone else, feel free to sign up for my free newsletter.

If you've enjoyed this article or found it useful, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know by clicking the Like or Share button below. Thank you! Learn how to create a Windows 11 sleep mode shortcut easily so you can invoke sleep mode directly bonus: sleep mode keyboard shortcut.

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