Chapter 9 Configuring Search and Indexing Options

1. Chapter 9Configuring Search and Indexing Options In Windows 7, you can find more things in more places—and do it faster. Start typing into the Start menu search box, and you'll instantly see a list of relevant documents, pictures, music, and e-mail on your PC. Results are now grouped by category and contain highlighted keywords and text snippets to make them easier to scan. Few people store all their files in one place these days. So Windows 7 is also designed to search external hard drives, networked PCs, and libraries. Overwhelmed by your search results? You can instantly narrow them by date, file type, and other useful categories.

3. Use the search box on the Start menuAs you type, items that match your text will appear on the Start menu. The search results are based on text in the file name, text in the file, tags, and other file properties.

4. Note • When searching from the Start menu, only files that have been indexed will appear in search results. Most files on your computer are indexed automatically. For example, anything you include in a library is automatically indexed.

6. You can Open Search by pressing Windows logo key +F. • Windows uses the index to perform very fast searches of the most common types of files on your computer. Instead of looking through your entire hard disk for a file name or property, Windows scans the index. • If you're searching in locations that aren't indexed, the search might be slow because Windows must inspect each file in those locations during the search. You can add those locations to the index to speed up future searches.

7. Open Indexing Options by clicking the Start button , and/or clicking Control Panel. In the search box, type indexing options, and then click Indexing Options.

8. Windows Search relies on a speedy, powerful, and well-behaved indexing service that does a fine job of keeping track of files and folders by name, by properties, and by contents.

9. All of those details are kept in the search index, a database that keeps track of indexed file names, properties, and the contents of files and e-mail messages. As a rule, when you do most common types of searches, Windows checks the index first and returns whatever results it finds there.

10. Windows 7 actually includes two search engines. The second engine is informally known as grep search. Windows Search uses the index whenever you use the search box on the Start menu, in the Search Home folder, in libraries, and in locations that are part of a homegroup. In those circumstances, search looks only in the index and ignores any subfolders that are excluded from the index.

11. Windows uses the grep search engine if you begin your search from the Computer window, from the root of any local drive (including the system drive), or from a local file folder. Grep searches include the contents of all subfolders within the search scope, regardless of whether they’re included in the search index.

12. The index is constructed dynamically by the Windows Search service, SearchIndexer.exe. The indexer crawls through all locations that are prescribed to be indexed, converting the content of documents (in supported formats) into plain text and then storing the text and metadata for quick retrieval.

14. Metadata is a means to describe the data files retrieved primarily by electronic form. It provides information about a certain item's content, including: means of creation, purpose of the data, time and date of creation, creator or author of data, placement on a network (electronic form) where the data was created, what standards used etc. For example: The purpose of an image created may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the color depth, the image resolution, when the image was created, and other data. A text document's metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document. Web pages often include metadata in the form of meta tags. Description and keywords meta tags are commonly used to describe the Web page's content. Most search engines use this data when adding pages to their search index.

15. The Windows Search service begins running shortly after you start a new Windows session. From that point on, it runs in the background at all times, creating the initial index and updating it as new files are added and existing ones are changed or deleted.

16. Protocol handlers do the work of cracking open different data stores to add items to the index; Windows 7 includes protocol handlers for Microsoft Office Outlook and Windows Live Mail, for example, to enable indexing of your e-mail messages as well as files. Property handlers allow Windows Search to extract the values of properties from items and store them properly in the index. Filters extract the contents of supported file types so that you can do full-text searches for those items.

17. Which Files and Folders Are in the Index? When you search for a snippet of text, you’re almost always looking for something you wrote, copied, or saved. So the default settings for the indexer make some reasonable inclusions and exclusions.

18. Certain locations are specifically included. These include your user profile (but not the AppData folder), the contents of the Start menu, and your Internet Explorer history .Offline files stored in the client-side cache (CSC) are automatically included in your local index. You can explicitly add other folders to the index, but Windows 7 eliminates the need to do that. Instead, just add the folder to a library; when you do so, Windows automatically adds that folder to the list of indexed locations and begins indexing its contents, without requiring any additional steps on your part.

19. To see which folders are currently being indexed, open the Indexing Options dialog box. You can find this in Control Panel, but it’s usually quicker to type index in the Start menu search box. Indexing Options should appear at the top of the results list, under the heading Control Panel.

20. Figure 9-1 When you add a local folder to a library, it’s automatically added to the list of locations included in the search index.

21. In its default view, the Indexed Locations list shows only locations that are accessible to your user account. To see (and manage) locations from other user profiles, click Show All Locations. As the User Account Control (UAC) shield icon makes clear, you’ll need to be logged on as an administrator (or provide an administrator’s credentials) to continue.

23. the following files and folders will be excluded: ●●The entire contents of the \Windows folder and all its subfolders ●●\$Recycle.Bin (the hidden folder that contains deleted files for all user accounts) ●●\Users\Default and all of its subfolders (this is the user profile template used to create a profile for a new user) ●●The entire contents of the \Program Files and \Program Files (x86) folders and all of their subfolders ●●The \ProgramData folder (except the subfolder that contains shortcuts for the shared Start menu)

24. The exact speed of indexing depends on a variety of factors, starting with the speed of your CPU and hard disk or disk subsystem and also factoring in the number, size, and complexity of documents and whether their full contents are being indexed.

25. The indexing service is specifically designed to back off when you use your computer for other activities. When Windows 7 first builds its index, or if you copy a large number of files to the system at once, the indexing can take a long time and cause some hard-disk chattering, but you shouldn’t notice any impact on performance.

26. Windows Explorer accesses the index directly, so even if the indexer is busy processing new and changed files it shouldn’t affect the speed of a search operation. In normal operation, retrieving search results from even a very large index should take no more than a few seconds. If you see hang-ups in either Windows Explorer or Microsoft Office Outlook when performing a search, you’ll need to look at the operation of the program itself to find the problem.

27. Figure 9-4 You can use this dialog box to rebuild an index that has stopped functioning properly. Indexing Option- Advanced…

28. Basic Search Techniques ●●From the search box at the bottom of the Start menu ●●From the search box in the upper right corner of any Windows Explorer window ●●From Control Panel ●●From a common file dialog box

29. Whatever text you type must appear at the beginning of a word, not in the middle. Thus, entering des returns items containing the words desire, destination, and destroy. ●Search terms are not case-sensitive. Thus, entering Bott returns items with Ed Bott as a tag or property. ●●To search for an exact phrase, enclose the phrase within quotation marks. Otherwise, you’ll be searching for each word individually.

30. Figure 9-5 Start menu searches return categorized shortcuts to programs, Control Panel tasks, documents, and other items included in the search index.

31. The scope of a search from the Start menu box covers the entire index, including document files, folders, internet shortcuts, e-mail messages, objects on a Microsoft Office OneNote page, and more. The initial display of results is limited to the space available on the left side of the Start menu, with each category limited, if necessary, to the top three results. If you’re not sure what an item returned by the search is, you can hover your mouse over it and read a tip with more details about the item.

32. If you’re unhappy with the results of Start menu searches, you have two customization options available. To control the reach of Start menu searches, right-click the Start button and choose Properties. On the Start Menu tab, click Customize. Finally, scroll down the Customize Start Menu dialog box until you reach the two settings that begin with Search. The Search Programs And Control Panel option is selected by default. To see only programs and Control Panel tasks, leave this setting unchanged and selectDon’t Search under the Search Other Files And Folders heading.

33. Refining a Search in Windows Explorer Searching from a Windows Explorer folder yields an uncategorized list of items from the current location—typically a folder or a library. It’s a great way to find something when you have a general idea of where it is saved and you want to filter out extraneous hits from inappropriate locations. For example, if you’re looking for songs by a particular artist, just click the Music library in the navigation pane and then start typing the artist’s name in the search box.

34. Figure 9-7 Select a folder or library to narrow the search scope, and use search filters (below the box in the upper right corner) to refine your results further.

36. There is no limit on the number of results that Windows 7 will return when you perform a search in a Windows Explorer folder (in one test of a well-used system, we searched for the word the and ended up with more than 75,000 items; a similar search for the even more common word a returned 145,000 items). Of course, scrolling through a results list containing thousands of items isn’t likely to be all that helpful; instead, you probably want to refine your search.

37. Table 9-2 Available Search Filters by Folder Type Folder Type Search Filters Available from the Search Box Documents: Authors, Type, Date Modified, Size, Name, Folder Path, Tags, Title Music : Album, Artists, Genre, Length, Folder Path, Year, Rating, Title Pictures: Date Taken, Tags, Type, Date Modified, Name, Size, Folder Path, Rating Videos: Length, Date Created, Type, Date Modified, Name, Folder Path, Tags, Rating General Items: Kind, Date Modified, Type, Size, Name, Folder Path, Tags

38. If you use multiple search filters, the search engine assumes you want to apply all filters to the result set, effectively using the AND operator. Each filter you add thus has the effect of further narrowing the current results set. You can change this behavior by manually grouping properties with parentheses and using the AND, OR, and NOT operators explicitly.

39. Searching by Item Type or Kind To search for files with a particular file name extension, you can simply enter the extension in the search box, like this: *.ext The results will include files that incorporate the extension in their contents as well as in their file names—which might or might not be what you want. You will get a more focused search by using the ext: operator including an asterisk wildcard and a period, like this: ext:*.txt

40. File name extensions are useful for some searches, but you’ll get even better results using two different search properties: Type and Kind. The Type property limits your search based on the value found in the Type field for a given object. Thus, to look for files saved in any Microsoft Office Excel format, type this term in the search box: type:excel To find any music file saved in MP3 format, type this text in the search box: type:mp3

42. Changing the Scope of a Search You can also specify a folder or library location using folder:, under:, in:, or path:. Thus, folder:documents restricts the scope of the search to your Documents library, and in:videos mackie finds all files in the Videos library that contain Mackie in the file name or any property.

43. Searching for Item Properties When you enter text in the search box, Windows searches file names, all properties, and indexed content, returning items where it finds a match with that value. That often generates more search results than you want. To find all documents of which Jean is the author, omitting documents that include the word Jean in their file names or content, you would type author:jean in the search box. (To eliminate documents authored by Jeanne, Jeannette, or Jeanelle, add an equals sign and enclose jean in quotation marks: author:="jean".)

44. When searching on the basis of dates, you can use long or short forms, as you please. For example, the search values modified:6/15/10 and modified:06/15/2010 are equivalent.

45. To search for dates before or after a particular date, use the less-than (<) and greater-than (>) operators. For example: modified:>11/16/09 would search for dates later than November 16, 2009.Use the same two operators to specify file sizes below and above some value. Use two periods to search for items within a range of dates. To find all e-mail messages you received in September or October 2009, type this search term in the Start menu search box: received:9/1/2009 .. 10/31/2009 You can also search for dates using text in long or short forms. For example: received:Feb 2009 lists all e-mail messages that landed in your indexed message store (Windows Live Mail or Microsoft Office Outlook 2007) during the month of February 2009.The same technique works for days of the week.

46. You can also use ranges to search by file size. The search filters suggest some common ranges and even group them into neat little buckets like the ones shown here, so you can type size: and then click Gigantic to find files greater than 128 MB in size.

47. You can specify an exact size range, using operators such as >, >=, <, and <=, or you can use the “..” operator. For example, size:0 MB..1 MB is the same as size:<=1 MB. You can specify values using bytes, KB, MB, or GB.

48. Using Multiple Criteria for Complex Searches You can use the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT to combine or negate criteria in the search box. These operators need to be spelled in capital letters (or they will be treated as ordinary text). In place of the AND operator, you can use a plus sign (+), and in place of the NOT operator, you can use a minus sign (–).You can also use parentheses to group criteria; items in parentheses separated by a space use an implicit AND operator.

49. Table 9-4 provides some examples of combined criteria.

50. Note When you use multiple criteria based on different properties, an AND conjunction is assumed unless you specify otherwise. The search value tag:Ed Author:Carl is equivalent to the search value tag:Ed AND Author:Carl.