Vista Indexing Options
Indexing greatly increases how quickly you are able to perform searches. By default only Offline Files, Start Menu and Users (excluding the “Default” subfolder) are indexed. You can easily change this default in order to speed up results when searching for files.
By default, the “Users” folder is where all your data will go, so having this indexed should suffice for most users. If you wish to search the entire system without using the managed index, you can do so by simply clicking “Advanced Search” and checking the “Include non-indexed, hidden, and system files (might be slow)” box. This will result in an exhaustive search of your system (or specified location) as you are accustomed to. This is fine for searches you do once in a while, but if you are taking advantage of Search Folders (see my post on Vista "Search Folders" for more on this), then you will want the areas that contain the files included in your index.
It is not recommended that you index everything! While possible, it will result in slower searches because an index too large cannot perform well. Therefore, you should limit indexing to folders where you store data files such as documents, scripts, images and music files. If an application you work with saves data you want to index in its Program Files application folder, add just this one folder to the included indexed locations and not the entire Program Files folder structure.
In some cases, you may want to exclude certain folders from indexing—this too is easy. To access all these options you can either select “Search Tools >> Search Options…” from the toolbar that appears in your search window or you may choose “Indexing Options” from the Control Panel (located under System and Maintenance).
From here you can choose what is to be indexed as well as advanced options like which file types you want to index and if you wish to include encrypted files (not selected by default). There are also buttons here to restore default settings and to rebuild the index. By default the index is stored in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft, but this too can be modified from the advanced index options.
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Comments
Vista search really is a letdown. It should have had these things:
1. Seperate Filename Search and Content Search since most people mostly do Filename Search.
2. Index all Filenames now option, I don't want to wait three days for it to index.
3. Schedule a rebuild if need be.
4. Scout, like Avafind has had for years. It keeps the index up to date with new files that are created or downloaded.
Sadly I can think of even endless features that could of been.....
Posted by: knightcrawler | April 1, 2007 4:41 PM
I think most of this is actually doable. If you click on Search Tools > Search Options, you'll get the search tab for folder options. You can choose what to search here. By default it searches only file names in non-indexed locations. If there is enough demand, I'm sure more such features may come but I think under normal circumstances, most people would not want to have their systems work so hard to ease their searching needs ;)
Posted by: Bob | April 3, 2007 10:01 PM
Not as point and click as a 100% solution, but the hooks are there to automate such things with the Scheduler and PowerShell. Check this out: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/wdscmdlet.asp
Posted by: Bob | April 5, 2007 9:24 PM