These groundbreaking new search experiences are possible because Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, and OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train the breakthrough models that are now being optimized for Bing.
keme, thanks for your input. I did all the things that John_Ha reccomends back in 2015, and I rebuild my desktop index at least once a year, usually more often than that. So whatever the problem is, it is not one that this solves. One thing I have not done is a fix via iFilter, suggested by the final comment in your link. But the last reference I could find here to iFilter was in 2017, and said the iFilter approach was outdated. -w-windows-10-indexing-odt-content-for-file-explorer-search-function/15999/ Note that I commented that I had the same problem in the 2017 posting.
I have a reasonably powerful machine and all the other heavy tasks like compiling and debugging all work fine. It also works if I restrict the search to the current document (Ctrl - F). I am running it as administrator and VS.NET 2003 SP1 has been applied.
The indexing service (Index Server 2.0) was introduced as part of an option-pack for Internet Information Services (IIS) in Windows NT 4.0 to perform content indexing of web server pages. This enabled users to search for text on web pages that were being hosted on an IIS server. The default location for these pages was C:\Inetpub, and that was one of the first folders the indexing service looked for content.
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. Docs to Index, Deferred for Indexing, and Word Lists were just a few that existed back then. Many more continue to be added and still worked on today.
Not only could your application use the APIs to configure the index, you could contribute your own data types to it as well. Originally the indexing service only knew how to process the content of files in the index as it could open every file in the same manner (NtCreateFile). Opening emails for indexing, or later on other Office or third-party data types was something that needed to be extensible and available to developers. There needed to be a way an application could tie into the system and provide its own data, whatever that might be. Developers at this time understood this gap and because of it, search protocols were born.
Most of the indexing features of Windows Vista went straight into Windows 7. By default, the indexing service indexed all files and folders under your user profile, but it did not index contents of all the files on your machine. This was something had to be turned on by the user. There was a new dialog in the Control Panel named Change search options for files and folders that you could use to fine tune how search worked on your machine. This directly impacted the behavior of the indexing service and how it handled your files.
Unlike Windows 7, in Windows 8 the indexing of the content of your files in your user profile was turned on by default. Searching was very easy in Windows 8 as you could just start typing and it would automatically enter in your criteria and search across settings files and apps all at the same time.
Windows Search (also known as Instant Search) is a content index desktop search platform by Microsoft introduced in Windows Vista as a replacement for both the previous Indexing Service of Windows 2000 and the optional MSN Desktop Search for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, designed to facilitate local and remote queries for files and non-file items in compatible applications including Windows Explorer. It was developed after the postponement of WinFS and introduced to Windows constituents originally touted as benefits of that platform.
Windows Search was introduced in Windows Vista as a replacement for the previous Indexing Service to facilitate data discovery and management, promote greater rapidity of search results, and to unify desktop search platforms across Microsoft Windows; it was also available as an optional download for Windows XP. There have been several updates to its functionality since its introduction, and it is also included in Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11.
Windows Search is the successor of the Indexing Service, a remnant of the Object File System feature of the Cairo project which never materialized. Microsoft began development of Windows Search after the postponement of WinFS; it introduces features originally touted as benefits of that platform, such as content indexing, incremental searching, and property stacking.
The time required for the initial creation of this index depends on the amount and type of data to be indexed, and can take up to several hours, but this is a one-time event.[1] Once a file's contents have been added to this index, Windows Search is able to use the index to search results more rapidly than it would take to search through all the files on the computer. Searches are performed not only on file names, but also on the contents of the file (provided a proper handler for the file type is installed such as a PDF reader) as well as the keywords, comments and all other forms of metadata that Windows Search recognizes. For instance, searching the computer for "The Beatles" returns a list of music files on the computer which have "The Beatles" in their song titles, artists or album names, as well as any e-mails and documents that include the phrase "The Beatles" in their titles or contents.
Windows Search features incremental search (also known as "search as you type"). It begins searching as soon as characters are entered in the search box, and keeps on refining and filtering the search results as more characters are typed in. This results in finding the required files even before the full search text is entered.
Windows Search supports IFilters, components that enable search programs to scan files for their contents and metadata. Once an appropriate IFilter has been installed for a particular file format, the IFilter is used to extract the text from files which were saved in that format.[2]
Windows Search is implemented as a Windows Service. The search service implements the Windows Search configuration and query APIs and also controls, as well as all indexing and query components. The most important component of Windows Search is the Indexer, which crawls the file system on initial setup, and then listens for file system notifications to pick up changed files in order to create and maintain the index of data. It achieves this using three processes:[6]
The search service consists of several components, including the Gatherer, the Merger,[7] the Backoff Controller, and the Query Processor, among others. The Gatherer retrieves the list of URIs that need to be crawled and invokes proper protocol handler to access the store that hosts the URI, and then the proper property-handler (to extract metadata) and IFilter to extract the document text. Different indices are created during different runs; it is the job of the Merger to periodically merge the indices.[7] While indexing, the indices are generally maintained in-memory and then flushed to disk after a merge to reduce disk I/O. The metadata is stored in property store, which is a database maintained by the ESE database engine.[7] The text is tokenized and the tokens are stored in a custom database built using Inverted Indices.[7] Apart from the indices and property store, another persistent data structure is maintained: the Gather Queue.[7] The Gather Queue maintains a prioritized queue of URIs that needs indexing. The Backoff Controller mentioned above monitors the available system resources, and controls the rate at which the indexer runs. It has three states:[7]
Windows Search queries are specified in Advanced Query Syntax (AQS) which supports not only simple text searches but provides advanced property-based query operations as well.[8] AQS defines certain keywords which can be used to refine the search query, such as specifying boolean operations on searched terms (AND, OR, NOT) as well as to specify further filters based on file metadata or file type. It can also be used to limit results from specific information stores like regular files, offline files cache, or email stores. File type specific operators are available as well.[9] Windows Desktop Search also supports wildcard prefix matching searches.[10] It also includes several SQL-like operators like GROUP BY. AQS is locale dependent and uses different keywords in international versions of Windows 7.
Users can access the Windows Search index programmatically using managed as well as native code.[11] Native code connects to the index catalog by using a Data Source Object retrieved from the Indexing Service OLE DB provider. Managed code use the MSIDXS ADO.NET provider. One can query a catalog on a remote machine by specifying a UNC path. Programmers specify the criteria for searches using SQL-like syntax. The SQL query can either be created by hand, or by using an implementation of the ISearchQueryHelper interface. Windows Search provides implementations of the interface to convert an AQS or NQS queries to their SQL counterpart.[12][13]
The OLE DB/SQL API implements the functionality for searching and querying across the indices and property stores. It uses a variant of SQL in which to represent the query (regular SQL with certain restrictions) and returns results as OLE DB Rowsets.[7] Whenever a query executes, the parts of the index it used are temporarily cached so that further searches filtering the result set need not access the disk again, in order to improve performance. Windows Search stores its index in an Extensible Storage Engine file named Windows.edb that exists, by default, in the \ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\ folder at the root of the system drive in Windows Vista or in later versions of Windows. (The corresponding location in Windows XP is \All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\ inside the Documents and Settings folder.)
df19127ead