Indexing Service

The Indexing Service is a base service for Microsoft® Windows® NT, Microsoft® Windows® 2000 or later that extracts content from files and constructs an indexed catalog to facilitate efficient and rapid searching.

Indexing Service can extract both text and property information from files on the local host and on remote, networked hosts. The files can be simply members of a selected file system or part of a virtual Web hosted by, for example, Internet Information Services (IIS).

Indexing Service extracts the content by filtering—using filter components that understand a file's format. The format could include multi-language features such as international languages and locales. A filter component implements the IFilter interface, which supplies methods to read a file to extract text and properties. Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows XP supply filters for Microsoft Office files, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) messages, and plain-text files.

The final step in the indexing process is creation of a catalog that contains a master index (and any temporary word lists and shadow indexes) storing words and their locations within a set of indexed documents. Subsequently, searching, or querying, the catalogs for particular word combinations uses the master index as well as word lists and shadow indexes to execute queries quickly and efficiently.

For “Indexing Service” engines, the KM will monitor the errors in the Windows Event Log, the presence and performance of the related processes as well as the size and content of the index catalogs. It will also perform search queries to verify the responsiveness of the search engine and the accuracy of the results.

Windows Desktop Search and Windows Search

Windows Desktop Search and Windows Search are different names of the same underlying technology which replaces the aging “Indexing Service” found in earlier versions of Microsoft Windows.

Different at its core, it nonetheless provides the very same features as the “Indexing Service” and the same metrics will be monitored to ensure its availability, responsiveness, accuracy and minimal impact on the system resources.

For “Windows Desktop Search” and “Windows Search” engines, the KM will monitor the errors in the Windows Event Log, the presence and performance of the related processes, the activity of the gatherer as well as the size and content of the index catalogs. It will also perform search queries to verify the responsiveness of the search engine and the accuracy of the results.