There are several ways to search in Windows. The native Windows Search is both loved and hated by users. It has been around in various incarnations, both as a standalone program and as an integrated search environment, since Windows 2000 (released in late 1999).
For those who have nothing against Windows Search, I provide a short summary how to start it up.
At the end of the post, I also name a few outstanding alternatives for those who prefer third-party search programs.
Enable Windows Search
Go to
In the
Click
After restarting your computer, you can expand the capabilities of the Search function.
Enable Indexing Service
To improve search speed you can enable the Windows Indexing Service.
Indexing simply means that Windows will create a database of all files on your drives, so that they can be searched more efficiently.
To enable indexing, go to
In the
Click
By default the database file is hidden.
On Windows Vista and Windows 7 systems it is located at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb
.
In the case of Windows XP the default location of the file is C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\All Users\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb
.
To enable indexing of a specific drive, open Windows Explorer (
In the drop-down menu select
In the
Then click
Indexing the drive’s contents will take a while. After the drive is indexed, click
Important Note
Advanced Indexing Options
You can tell Windows specifically which locations to index and whether you wish to search for file names only or also search the contents of files.
Specify Indexing Locations
To do this, click on the
Click on
In the Indexing Options window, click on the
In the Indexed Locations window, tick all locations on your drives you want to have indexed and, when finished, click
Advanced Indexing Options
In the Indexing Options window, click on the
In the
And in the
Use Extra IFilters
Windows Search uses IFilters to search the contents of specific file types.
By default Windows Search includes IFilters for the following file types:
- Word documents
- Excel spreadsheets
- PowerPoint presentations
- HTML files
- plain-text files
- MP3 and WMA music files
- WMV, ASF and AVI video files
- JPEG, BMP and PNG image files
It is possible to expand the capabilities of Windows Search by adding more IFilters to it.
TIFF
Within the
PDF
I have already written a post about searching the contents of PDF without using any IFilters whatsoever.
To be able to search the contents of PDF files using Windows Search, install the free Adobe Reader program. It already comes bundled with 32-bit PDF IFilter which allows third-party indexing tools to extract text from Adobe PDF files.
To use the Adobe PDF IFilter with 64-bit Windows systems, download and install the standalone IFilter here.
64-bit versions of Windows 8 do not require Adobe’s PDF IFilter, as they already come with Microsoft’s own PDF IFilter.
Commercial IFilters
There are also dozens of paid IFilters for various file formats available for purchase. Many of them are listed here.
Another Way to Search
There are faster alternatives to Windows Search both when searching file contents, as well as when searching for file names only.
In a previous post of mine, I have written about grep. An efficient command-line tool to search file contents.
If you don’t like Windows Search for whatever reason, you can replace it with Everything. This application searches file names only.
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