Practicing the Black Art (03/03)
Repair The XP Search Engine, Did You Know It Was Broken?
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
A filter in a search engine is designed to catch whatever you specify in your search criteria and allow everything else to pass through it. Windows XP has an extremely powerful filter with one flaw, it doesn't always work. You won't get any error message, and there is no way of knowing that your search failed. This doesn't happen when you do a parametric search. That's when you search on a parameter of a file. A parameter is a property of a file. It could be a file name, a part of its name, a file extension, date, size or some other property that Windows XP knows about and recognizes.
The problem may occur when you do something called a contextual search. For example, you have a number of recipe files and you want all the recipes that contain 'orange marmalade' as an ingredient. Back at the office you want to find all the documents that contain references to 'The Great Widget Company'.
When you search for files that contain text by using the A word or phrase in
the file search criterion, the search results may not contain files that
contain the text that you specified. Making things even worse, this problem
may occur even if you specified the file name or type in the All or part of
the file name box.
Microsoft created the problem inadvertently because it tried to construct the XP search engine so it would perform well and be easy to use. To accomplish this, the boys from Redmond decided to construct the filter components only for file types associated with common documents. Microsoft thinks common files types are:
* MIME files (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension)
* HTML files (HyperText Markup Language)
* Microsoft Office files
* Plain Text files
* Binary files (Most files not included in the above items)
Microsoft did this to enhance performance and avoid extraneous results. However, if you're searching for text in an HTML document and the text that you're looking for is contained in a comment, the search engine ignores it because when you open the HTML file in your browser, comments are not normally displayed. The search engine also ignores any file type the Registry doesn't know about, including some files without extensions. To configure Windows XP to search all files no matter what the file type, obtain the latest service pack for Windows XP, install it, and then turn on the Index file types with unknown extensions option.
If you use this method, Windows XP searches all file types for the text that you specify. This can affect the performance of the search functionality. To do this:
1. Click Start, and then click Search. 2. Click Change preferences, and then click With Indexing Service (for faster local searches).
3. Click Change Indexing Service Settings (Advanced). Note that you do not have to turn on the Index service. Indexing Service is a method of gathering information from files, and organizing it in a way that makes it quick and easy to access through the Windows XP Search function.
4. On the toolbar, click Show/Hide Console Tree. (Illustration on left.)
5. In the left pane, right-click Indexing Service on Local Machine, and then click Properties.
6. On the Generation tab, click to select the Index files with unknown extensions check box, and then click OK.
7. Close the Indexing Service console.
Note: If you are feeling brave or are a competent network administrator, you can alternately configure this setting by modifying the registry. This is easily done by setting the Filter Files With Unknown Extensions DWORD value to 1 in the following registry key::
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet\Control\ContentIndex
The Windows XP search engine will now find any contextual material you search for, provided it exists on your system and you point to the correct disk drive. :
Return to Vinny La Bash's Index
Copyright 2003. This article is from the March 2003 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,100+ members and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are members of the America Online Ambassador Program.
See http://www.spcug.org for all reviews from the Sarasota PC Monitor, go to the Newsletter Section.