Tag Info

Hot answers tagged

179

Google is not searching the internet: it is searching an index. Google has huge server farms which are constantly scanning and indexing the internet. This process takes a lot of time, just like the search of your unindexed hard drive. In Windows 7, there is an option to index your hard drives. This process takes some time at first but once it is up and ...


60

Google is like searching the yellow pages for an address (indexed). Windows search is akin to driving around checking numbers on buildings (non-indexed). Another analogy would be looking through a well organized library and card catalog, or just sorting through an unorganized pile of books every time. Fundamentally it's all the organizational work done ...


60

To get to the Index Options: Start --> Control Panel --> Index Options See Change advanced indexing options for more information. If you click on the Advanced button in Indexing Options and go to the File Types tab, you will get a list of file types and the way they are indexed. For the file types you want, you can specify that you want the file ...


29

Google's business is search (and serving up Ads) and it's very focused on that. There are number of things that Google does to ensure data is returned to you very fast: First it uses MapReduce and PageRank to generate a comprehensive index of the World Wide Web. It updates this regularly so the results are fresh. That index is distributed and replicated ...


27

About 4 years ago I also asked myself the same question. But as I googled around doing my research I eventually read that besides the fact that they hire the best of the best to come up with some of the most sophisticated search algorithms and all of that. One of the key design they used is similar to the idea of map reduce I think. You have a lot of cheap ...


24

From the Windows Search Advanced Query Syntax page, use the following search items: To restrict by file type Use Example ------------------------ --- ------- Folders folders kind:folders Folder name foldername foldername:mydocs


19

Google uses an extremely sophisticated indexing system, parallel operations, and a number of load balancing techniques not available to a standard standalone computer. there is really very little similarity between a web search and a hard disk file search, and google optimizes heavily for their specific use cases.


15

Don't bother for the checkbox "Allow files on this drive...". Even if it's checked, if the service is disabled, Windows won't index anything at all. If you want, you can completely uninstall Windows Search, as explained in this tutorial (at maximumpcguides.com).


11

No, there isn't. Recall the blog post for designing search on the Start Screen: Searching via the Start menu has continued to evolve with each release. The Windows 8 Start search experience builds on top of search features available in Windows 7 and provides a unique view for each of the three system groups - Apps, Settings and Files. These search result ...


10

The previous two answers show you how to disable Windows search altogether. This also causes search boxes in various places to disappear, most notably the search box on the bottom of the Start menu and the search box at the top right of file explorers. Personally, I like the search box in various places, I just don't want an indexing process to be running ...


10

I was having the same problem and found a solution. All my code is stored under a single folder: F:\projects\ Under that folder are trees of code and related project files that total over 2GB. I constantly need to search this tree and windows Indexing has actually been an extremely useful tool for doing fast searches, so turning it off was not an option. ...


9

If your objective is to retain search functionality, but not to use indexes, you need the set up the following situation: Turn off the indexing (to prevent an index being produced). Delete the existing index (to prevent windows from using the index during searches). Avoid re-enabling indexing. Optional: enable the searching of file contents. Turning off ...


9

Just to confirm your suspicion Agent Ransack does not use indexes there's actually a KB article on indexing (although for the bigger brother FileLocator Pro it's still valid): http://www.mythicsoft.com/kb/Does%20FileLocator%20Pro%20use%20indexing.ashx Whether Agent Ransack performs better is down to the type of searching you're doing and the type of ...


7

Notepad++ will do this. Plus it's awesome. And it's free. It will list all the files it finds the text in, with previews so you don't have to open each file to check if it's the one you're actually after.


7

Summary from this page limit what folders are indexed update your Windows Search to version 4.0 (But only if Windows Updater hasn't already done) HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search\DisableBackoff set the value to 1 if you are on a non-domain joined computer on domain joined computer, edit your group policy and set Disable indexer ...


7

I think you could be correct when you say that there's a corrupted file that causes it to hang. A crude way of trying to identify the file is to go the files tab and turn off half the files types from being indexed. Let it run. Either it completes or it stops. If it stops, turn off half again. If it completes, you know the bad file type is in the other ...


7

I looked in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\CrawlScopeManager\Windows\SystemIndex\DefaultRules key and found something interesting. DefaultRules\1 contains: Default REG_DWORD 0x00000001 Include REG_DWORD 0x00000000 Policy REG_DWORD 0x00000000 Suppress REG_DWORD 0x00000000 URL REG_SZ ...


6

IFilters allow Windows Search to search within file contents. Here are three popular PDF IFilters. They are ordered by search performance according to this article: Foxit PDF IFilter (commercial, fastest) TET PDF IFilter (free/commercial, fast) Adobe PDF IFilter (32-bit / 64-bit) (free, slow) After installing one, you should be able to search within PDF ...


6

OK, I hope this helps for people who are having problems with Windows 7 Search in Google Drive folder. After a few days of playing around, finally got windows search to work and best of all, search inside files(e.g. word, excel) works too! make sure security permissions for 3 users (specifically the SYSTEM group) are given FULL access to Google Folder. I'm ...


6

Windows 7 still has the ability to search for strings inside files everywhere (and not in indexed locations). In Windows Explorer, go to menu Tools/Folder options and select "Always search file names and contents". Probably the file types still have to be set up correctly in Advanced Options of Indexing Options".


5

AFAIK, Windows Indexing service on Windows 7 only looks within the Users folder as default (correct me if I am wrong). If you have your SVN repositories within your personal folder, you can: a) Putting your SVN repositories elsewhere b) By excluding those folders from the index. Here you will find how to exclude a folder.


5

It looks like Microsoft has removed the ability to search just for special characters. In order to search with special characters there must also be a word included with it (Example: Who?). Again, there must be a word, not just a wildcard, with the special character. That is because Windows Search ignores the special characters with the exception of the ...


5

At least as regarding Firefox : Firefox keeps the history in the database places.sqlite, which is an SQLite database. One would therefore need to write a general filter for SQLite databases for Windows Desktop Search (gigantic project!), or at least a specific one for places.sqlite. The problem is that the structure of places.sqlite is not quite published. ...


5

SEARCH_DIR="/some/dir/where/you/want/to/search/"; SEARCH_STRING="whatever-you-are-searching"; # extracting text from pdf pdftotext "file.pdf" "file.txt" # connecting with grep pdftotext "file.pdf" /dev/stdout |grep -H --label="file.pdf" -- "$SEARCH_STRING" # if you want grep to show only file list of matching pdf file, add --files-with-matches ...


5

For the first part of your question: R00UUUUUUUUZZXD-30NU tells Windows to search the last 30 days. Changing 30 to 1 would make it search the last 24 hours. In your case you are looking to set the value to R00UUUUUUUUZZXD-7NU. Reference this forum post. For the second part of your question perhaps start by looking at the System.DateModified ...


5

Search in Windows 7 does not just operate on filenames. It will also search inside of any document that it knows how to read (.doc, .xls, .pdf, emails in Outlook, etc). It's also very customizable by what you want to search and prioritizes results differently based on where/how you're searching. Here's a couple of links that might help you: ...


4

Read the reasoning for not just encrypting just the index in this TechNet page Encrypting the Index To encrypt the index file itself, we recommend that you encrypt the entire volume containing the index with BitLocker or another 3rd party full-volume encryption option. This provides strong protection against offline attacks; online ...


4

Take a look at grepwin, it is very flexible and also supports regular expressions. You can narrow down the filetypes it looks in further with the "Files with match:" box. There you can use a combination such as MyLogFile.txt_*.


4

There is a setting in the group policy for the computer, so you don't have to manually edit the registry. Open run dialog: Win+R Type gpedit.msc and hit OK Browse to Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Search Select disable backoff, and set it to Enabled. http://codingtrek.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-to-enable-backoff-for-t.html


4

The obvious fix would be to change Subversion to set this "don't index" flag whenever it creates a .svn directory. The problem is that this feature will be no longer needed when it's introduced. The known problem will most likely go away in the Subversion versions that's currently being developed (version 1.7). There will be far less file operations inside ...



Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible