So I thought I should wind down my discussion of Windows Search with a few comments on the Indexing Options control panel. Once you get a system well tuned with the settings hosted by this cpanel, you can build those settings into Group Policy and deploy them throughout your network. Or, if you only have a handful of file servers, configure them manually. You’ll see this control panel after you install the Windows Search service, which is part of the File Server role in Server 2008. If you’ve ever set up Vista’s search options, the server’s Indexing Options control panel will be familiar to you.
By default, the indexed locations include the Start Menu and the Users folder. Click the Modify button to add to this modest list; browse the local file system, check the boxes for the folder or folders you want to add to the index, and click OK. The service will get busy updating the index in the background. It’s a low priority activity so it shouldn’t have much of an impact on server operations; still, probably best to do your reindexing when the server is otherwise fairly bored.
You can do considerable tuning of the file types with the three goals of 1) maximizing search speed, 2) ensuring that searches capture relevant data, and 3) keeping the index reasonably small. For each file type (this is available via the Advanced button and the File Types tab), you can specify whether the index should include metadata only (e.g. file name) or metadata plus contents. If a file type doesn’t appear, you’ll need to hunt down an iFilter for it, but most of the ones you need will already be on the list.
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