How Windows Search Works

The underlying architecture and operation of indexing has changed considerably in Windows 7 and Windows Vista compared with search capabilities built into earlier versions of Windows. Understanding how search and indexing works can be helpful for configuring, maintaining, and troubleshooting search and indexing.

Understanding Search Engine Terminology

The following terminology describes search and indexing as it has been implemented in Windows 7 and Windows Vista:

  • Catalog The index with the property cache.

  • Crawl scopes (inclusions and exclusions) Included and excluded paths within a search root. For example, if a user wants to index the D drive but exclude D:\Temp, he would add a crawl scope (inclusion) for “D:\*” and a crawl ...

Get Windows® 7 Resource Kit now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.