Search indexing in Windows 10: FAQ

Indexing the contents of your PC helps you get faster results when you’re searching it for files and other things. Learn how it works.

What is indexing?

Indexing is the process of looking at files, email messages, and other content on your PC and cataloging their information, such as the words and metadata in them. When you search your PC after indexing, it looks at an index of terms to find results faster.

When you first run indexing, it can take up to a couple hours to complete. After that, indexing will run in the background on your PC as you use it, only re-indexing updated data.

How does indexing make my searches faster?

Much like having an index in a book, having a digital index allows your PC and apps to find content faster by looking for terms or common properties such as the date a file was created. A fully built index can return answers to searches such as «Show all songs by Coldplay» in a fraction of a second, versus the minutes it could take without an index.

What information is indexed?

By default, all the properties of your files are indexed, including file names and full file paths. For files with text, their contents are indexed to allow you to search for words within the files.

Apps you install may also add their own information to the index to speed up searching. For example, Outlook 2016 adds all emails synced to your machine to the index by default and uses the index for searching within the app.

Which apps use the index?

Many of the built-in apps on your PC use the index in some way. File Explorer, Photos, and Groove all use it to access and track changes to your files. Microsoft Edge uses it to provide browser history results in the address bar. Outlook uses it to search your email. Cortana uses it to provide faster search results from across your PC.

Many apps in the Microsoft Store also depend on the index to provide up-to-date search results for your files and other content. Disabling indexing will result in these apps either running slower or not working at all, depending on how heavily they rely on it.

Why does indexing automatically run on my PC at all times?

Your Windows 10 PC is constantly tracking changes to files and updating the index with the latest information. To do this, it opens recently changed files, looks at the changes, and stores the new information in the index.

Where is the index information stored?

All data gathered from indexing is stored locally on your PC. None of it is sent to any other computer or to Microsoft. However, apps you install on your PC may be able to read the data in the index, so be careful with what you install and make sure you trust the source.

How much space is used by the index?

A rule of thumb is that the index will be less than 10 percent of the size of the indexed files. For example, if you have 100 MB of text files, the index for those files will be less than 10 MB.

The index can take up a larger percentage if you have lots of very small files ( Modify.

What languages can be indexed?

All language packs installed with Windows include the information for indexing content in that language. If you have files or other content in a language that isn’t installed on your PC, the index will try to make it searchable, but that isn’t always possible.

To install more language packs to make sure the language is searchable on your PC, go to Settings > Time & Language > Region & language, and then select Add a language .

Which file types can be indexed?

For a list of file types that can be indexed, go to the Indexing Options control panel page and select Advanced > File Types.

Can I change how much of a file’s information is indexed?

Yes. There are two options for how much of a file to index: either properties only, or properties and content. For properties only, indexing will not look at the contents of the file or make the contents searchable. You’ll still be able to search by file name—just not file contents.

Choosing not to index the contents of files can reduce the size of the index, but it makes files harder to find in some cases.

To choose an option for each file type, go to the Indexing Options control panel page and select Advanced > File Types.

What’s drive indexing on Windows 10 and how it works

• By turning on certain components of the index service you can speed up file searches or you can choose to disable it.
• In most cases, this service is turned on automatically, but you can also enable the indexing service in Windows 10 manually.
• For more helpful tips, just visit our Windows 10 section next.
• Check out our How to page for tech tutorials, as well as various tips and tricks.

There are many things Windows as an OS platform does good. One of those is manipulation of files and directories. The user interface is similar for ages, and it’s hard to argue about its intuitive nature.

Another thing which is rather useful is system search. Thanks to a file indexing, the searches for obscure files in your local drives are not dull and lengthy.

If you ever wondered how it works and how to, if the need arises, disable it, make sure to check to continue reading and find out.

What does Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed.. mean?

Even though Windows 10 is the new star for a couple of years, this trick is part of Windows for ages.

File’s contents indexing is an old feature which is resourcefully implemented in order to speed up the search process of local files.

However, nowadays, we can question whether it’s useful or it’s really just slowing down your system due to not-perfect indexing times.

Here, we’re referring to everyday users and not the enterprises. Windows 10 focuses on files you frequently use and access.

So, it shouldn’t be an issue to let it be since it’s enabled by default and strictly focuses on certain directories and not every given file within the given partition.

How does it work?

It basically scans all accessed folders and subfolders contained within the partition. Then, it indexes them and, the next time you search for a file or a folder, the searching process is vastly faster.

The more files you commonly use and look for, the greater value of this nifty feature. The idea is to index files while the PC is idle, however, this isn’t the case for some users.

Namely, some of them reported frequent HDD usage spikes during the startup or while using some demanding applications.

This will, of course, affect the overall system performance. On the other hand, looking up for that one file in the directory with tens of thousands can be a slow-death experience, so have that in mind.

Quick tip

Copernic Desktop Search is a free search tool for file search on your own PC. The program searches MS Office, HTML, PDF, text and OpenOffice files.

Using categories it can distinguish between file categories such as music, photos, videos or e-mails from Outlook or Mozilla programs.

Copernic Desktop Search currently supports over 119 different file types for indexing and previewing. This search file tool indexes better and finds more files than regular Windows 10 search.

Copernic Desktop Search

How can I enable or disable file indexing on the given partition?

1. Turn off indexing for a specific partition

1. Open This PC or File Explorer.
2. Right-click on the partition you want to relieve of indexing and open Properties.
3. Uncheck the Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties box.
4. Restart your PC.

This feature is, by default, enabled on all your various partitions or drives. Including the external partitions connected to Windows 10 PC. Disabling it is as simple as possible.

Just navigate to This PC or File Explorer, right-click on the partition at hand and open Properties. What you want to do next is uncheck the Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties box, as above mentioned.

2. Change indexing options

1. In the Windows Search bar, type index and open Indexing Options.
2. Click Modify to choose the directories you commonly access.
3. Click Advanced and choose the File Types tab.
4. Select file types you want to be indexed (or uncheck the ones you don’t see necessary) by checking the boxes.
5. Confirm changes and restart your PC.

Another good thing you can do is make a selective indexing. Meaning, the indexing will focus on directories you choose and it won’t take a toll on your HDD or processing power.

You can choose a certain file type to be indexed (this can come in handy if you have lots of photos), too. Also, you can exclude subdirectories or file extensions if you deem them redundant.

In case you have something interesting to add, we encourage you to do so in the comments section below.

Windows 7/8/10 File Search Indexing Options

Much better and more configurable than Vista or XP

The built-in search feature in Windows 7/8/10 is significantly better than the horrible search options in Windows Vista and XP. Instead of installing a third-party program to search for files on inside files on your computer, you can now do it with easily from Windows 7/8/10.

For example, let’s say you’re a programmer or web developer and you want to be able to search your code files like .aspx, .html, .java, .php, etc. With Windows 7, you can configure the search indexer to not only index any file you want, but also to index the file contents.

By default, the Search Indexer in Windows 7/8/10 indexes the most common locations where your files would be stored, i.e. all libraries, everything in your User folder, and e-mail. If this is not enough, you can add or remove index locations easily.

However, to be clear, there are some really good third-party programs that will let you do faster and more advanced searches of text files than Windows ever could.

Configure Indexing Options in Windows

That means you can tell Windows 7/8/10 to index and return results from files and folder on network drives or external hard drives. To get started , click on Start, then type in search into the search box.

This will bring up the Indexing Options dialog. In Windows 10, you’ll click on Change how Windows searches. At the top, you’ll see the total number of items that have currently been indexed on your computer. Below that, you will see a list of all the locations that have been included for indexing.

To add a new location to the index, click on the Modify button. Any network drive or external hard drive will show up in the list of possible locations. You can check off any drive or folder that you would like to include in the index.

Depending on how many files and folders are in a location, it could take some time for search indexer to index everything. If you have noticed that certain files are not being indexed by search indexer even though they are included in the search locations, you may have to add the file type.

You can do this by clicking on the Advanced button on the main Indexing Options screen. Then click on the File Types tab.

If the file extension is not in the list, go ahead and add it at the bottom. Then select it and choose whether you want to index just the properties or the properties and the file contents. If you know the file contains only text, make sure to select the second radio button.

You can also click on Index Settings to modify some of the settings for the Search Indexer.

Here you can choose to index encrypted files and other options like treating similar words with diacritics as different words. If you are having problems with Windows search or something has become corrupted, you can rebuild the index by clicking the Rebuild button.

Lastly, you can completely move the search index to another disk or partition. If you have a faster hard drive that the OS is not running on, it might be a good idea to move it so that it performs faster. Similar to how moving the paging file to another disk will make things run faster.

Overall, the new search features in Windows 7/8/10 are greatly enhanced and let you customize most of the search options. Enjoy!

Founder of Help Desk Geek and managing editor. He began blogging in 2007 and quit his job in 2010 to blog full-time. He has over 15 years of industry experience in IT and holds several technical certifications. Read Aseem’s Full Bio

How to Search Through File Contents on Windows 10

Windows comes with a robust search engine that allows you to find apps, search the Windows Store and the web, and find files on your PC. The search engine in Windows 7 used to find content not just in file names, but also in the contents of files. You could even search the contents of .zip files in Windows 7.

Most people are unaware that this functionality still exists in Windows 10. It’s just not obvious how to enable it. Today we’ll show you how to enable searching through file contents in Windows 10.

Turn on Option To Search Through File Contents

Click the Cortana or Search button or box on the Taskbar and type “indexing options.” Then, click on Indexing Options under Best match.

On the Indexing Options dialog box, click Advanced.

Click the File Types tab on the Advanced Options dialog box. By default, all the extensions are selected, and that’s what we want. This will allow Windows to search through all the types of files on your hard drive.

Select the Index Properties and File Contents option in the How should this file be indexed section. Then, click OK.

A Rebuild Index dialog box displays, warning you that rebuilding the index might take a long time. That means that all the contents of your hard drive might not be searched until the indexing process is finished. Click OK.

Click Close on the Indexing Options dialog box.

Search Through File Contents in File Explorer

Now, when you search for text in File Explorer, Windows will search the contents of files for the text in addition to searching the file names.

Remember, if you don’t get results for your search right away, you may have to wait for the folders and files to be indexed.

What methods do you use to search the contents of files in Windows? Do you use any third-party apps to search the contents of files? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments.

32 Comments

Well THANK YOU Lori Kaufman!! Not being able to search contents has been a pain.

I agree – this page was very helpful!

I just need to search a project folder without having to enable indexing on all system. Is Microsoft incapable to just add something simple as a grep command ? The Find in files option in previous versions of Windows was good enough for the job. But as usual when something is good for the users MS kills it. No brain- No Pain – Big Gain for MS.

Thanks. Turn this way down to just a few boxes back when was having h/w issues in Windows 8 & then into 10. Now with more powerful & stable gear it’s time to click these back on. Will help with the video files as well as within .docx & photo, art files.

Microsoft never really promoted the search function well enough, it is fundamental to the way the O/S’s since Windows 7 are geared towards using the search function rather than go trawling through the file explorer tree, I am fairly confident they are visionary in this approach as in the future computers will not rely so heavily on computing, but will have all possible answers pre-loaded in the quantum field and the user would simply feed in the quest and the computer would then search for the single correct answer.

Quite the opposite in fact. Simply having answers pre-loaded does not mean anything for computing speed. The very action of searching, or to be more precise sorting the information in more feasible manner, still requires both computing and time. This has not changed, even with the advent of Quantum Computing. Google operates in the same manner and is a clear example of what is at the forefront, they have machines already performing the search beforehand. Yet what the user inputs is really the search engine sorting out the information in a way that seems the most relevant to the user.

Working in this field of search/sort algorithms, I do not think that we will see any new innovations on this subject in decades to come, sadly enough.

This is honestly the first time that I see this feature on Windows. Good job.

Thank you! Is there a way to print the contents of a folder (a list of all the files in a file)? I used to do this on my Atari computer and it was quite handy at times.

I have got File – Home – Share – View but not Search on the toolbar.

What am I doing wrong.

Me also. I don’t have the Search tab. Only File – Home – Share – View

Hi Bill and Dolly,

Not to worry! As soon as you enter anything in the search boxes located below the toolbar, the Search tab magically appears!

For an example, look at the last picture above and you will see the search boxes labeled 1 and 2. Type anything in the #2 box on your computer and you will see the search tab show up.

Hope that helps.

How do I force Windows File Explorer to display OpenOffice files on searching a term? I can search “.odt” and get results, but when I search a directory that contains such OpenOffice files, I get no results, other than old doc, docx, adobe and so on.

I tried to search the way you describe above and got .odt results no matter how I searched. I used phrases from .odt documents and I tried searching just .odt and had no problem.

So, I am wondering if you followed the steps laid out in this post to open search to titles and contents of documents? If not, then I would do that first.

If you have already done that, I would suggest going to the page shown above named Advanced Options and on the File Types tab, scroll down the list and make sure the odt file type is checked. If not, check the box, wait for indexing (takes a while) is complete, then try your search again.

Hope this helps you!

Thanks, I had discovered that. Now I am annoyed that details | content shows a tiny thumbnail, not the nice full preview I get with pdf files.

The indexing does not seem to work at all for file content even in indexed locations.
The disk I am searching has around 55GB data. Where Google desktop would have given a result as I typed, Win10 search either does not find at all or takes several hours.
Win 10 search takes as input only a word or phrase, not several key words.

But, I do not know of any tool that will do so either. Any help will be appreciated

Use Windows Commander rather than W’10’s search engine. It is convenience and fast with great configuration.

I used to use the free word perfect editor. It worked just like word perfect but worked at a text file level. I could quickly search thru Windows MSWord files for context content. Mainly speaches so I could do a quick analysis of a proposed speech for the main concepts of the proposed speech and advise on what the official line had been on key words.

It was called WEd.exe
see it at
https://sites.google.com/site/texteditors/Home/files/wp_ed.zip?attredirects=0
wp_ed.zip
I would run it in a command window. F3 gives you the menu, you set the folder you want to search and specify the content key words you want to find and it would list all the files then you would just do f2 to search thru for the key words. I could do this faster than any two people in my office. Now I would just use findstr in a batch file.

So, if your IT department has any brains at all, you don’t have Administrator Rights on your own PC (preventing you from installing unapproved software – software that might be free for home use but licensing requirements if used for business, software that might have a virus, software that might interfere with the software provided by the company, etc.). You need Admin rights to click on “Advanced” in “Indexing Options”. Is there any other way to search through file contents, i.e. something you don’t need Admin rights for?

Third party software like ultra search

I had been so disappointed all these years with Windows 10 that I couldn’t do a phrase search. I finally decided to look it up…I’m SOoo glad I found you to clear this up!

I have file with dashes and numbers in the name. No searches appear after a begin typing the dash and first 2 digits:

During the last 3-4 months there has been a drastic (and unwelcome) change to the search feature. I often searched for content inside many types of files with no problems. Now I have nothing but problems. I found the procedure you outline above on my own and hoped things would change, but no joy. I experience many false positives and false negatives. (I.e., files reported by search do NOW contain the search term, and failure to find files I KNOW are there. Additionally, the search is returned in some kind of virtual screen that has no apparent connection to the rest of File Explorer, i.e., I cannot get back to the folder I was searching. Back buttons don’t work, ESC doesn’t work, deleting the search term (my former default) doesn’t work. I can only conclude that someone at MS has royally screwed up this feature. I will have to find a utility to search inside files like I used to use years ago.

Search Note is an impressive way to search content inside your shared documents.
Why don’t you give it a try? Search note is available on github.
https://github.com/scorpionit01/SearchNote

03 Aug 2020: Followed all steps successfully…EXCEPT A WORKING SEARCH OF CONTENTS. Added the php extension, allowed it to complete indexing, did a cold boot, used the indexing troubleshooter (which said Windows Search wasn’t working, then said it fixed the problem). Still finds two (pdf) files which do not have the string and none that do, same as before.

This information is quite helpful to me. I was finding hard time searching and locating file names. The only results I was getting ended with folder names. Thank you.

24 August 2020. I followed these steps long ago, and have never been able to search file content in W-10. Tried it again today. A search that should have turned up about 200 or so documents in a particular client’s folder showed 83.

No, it’s not an ordinary word.

I also noted that three Word documents which were done this morning (and obviously have not yet been indexed), which had the word in the body, showed up on the list. The other 80 had the word in the file name. But I know for a fact those 200+ documents exist. And if the search had functioned properly I would have been able to figure out which of those 200 was the one I need to find.

All of which says to me that once my system has indexed something, despite the “index file name/contents” being clicked, a search of the content isn’t possible.

Make sure that windows search service enabled.

This is a very good hint. I usually resort to Bash tools on command line but this is much more convenient. Thanks.

I just compared the (right-click on filename)Properties for SEARCH.TXT and SEARCH_SUB.TXT. I clicked on “Advanced” in the Properties window under the General tab, There is a box that says “Allow this file to have contents indexed in addition to other file properties”. SEARCH.TXT had it checked, while it was unchecked for SEARCH_SUB.TXT. This kind of garbage is why MS can drive users crazy. Was it an oversight or did some exec realize that if a User had a big tree of large files under Documents, that searching would bog down. Now the question: how do I batch set this attribute for my many 1000”s of TXT, DOC, PDF, XLS, etc files? And dare I do it? Maybe it will make File Explorer searches into monsters.

Important actions preceded my previous post, so read this first. I created a new TXT file I called SEARCH.TXT in my Documents folder and added the text “bbbb”. After typing bbbb in File Explorer’s search window, Explorer found the SEARCH.TXT file. I tried the same procedure creating a SEARCH_SUB.TXT file in a subfolder I’ll call Documents\Subfold. But now the a search for bbbb failed and only came up with SEARCH.TXT, but not SEARCH_SUB.TXT (both files were identical except for where they resided). I moved SEARCH.TXT into Documents\Sobfold. The search for bbbb still found SEARCH.TXT in Documents\Subfold. I created an identical SEARCH.TXT in the special, MS pre-loaded folders in my User file like Music, Downloads, Pictures and Videos. The search for bbbb worked in these subfolders! I moved SEARCH_SUB.TXT from its subfolder into the Documents folder and opened and resaved it. Still not discoverable.

Turns out there’s a “Contents Searchability” Attribute that is set when files are created in these special pre-loaded folders (Documents, Music,…), but is not set when created in a subfolder (at least not on my Windows 10 version).

One nice free tool I forgot to mention is called “Agent Ransack”; yeah, it’s legit, free for the free version. There is a pro version that honestly, I never felt the need for.
I installed and on the desktop shortcut, I added a hot-key combo “ctrl-alt-shift-f” and off it goes.
But I must say that when I’m already looking stuff in Explorer, I rather use the built-in and search from there.