Indexing Service is a Windows 2000 and Windows XP feature which supports rapid searching of file contents and properties across many thousands of files. Indexing Service provides this capability by extracting information from files and storing it in indexes organized for fast searching. These indexes are stored in units called catalogs. The default catalog is called System, and it indexes your local hard drives. You can create additional catalogs, delete existing catalogs, add and remove folders from catalogs, and perform other management tasks through the Computer Management Console, where Indexing Service appears under Services and Applications. Once you've configured Indexing Service to your liking, it works in the background indexing your files and requires little if any further attention from you. While the initial catalogs may take a while to build, once built, we find that this background processing is sufficiently non-intrusive that it's often acceptable to leave Indexing Service on all the time. (Note that Indexing Service is not enabled by default, so you must enable it yourself.)

Eluent Tools supports Indexing Service in Path Plans, and you can use the Indexing Service Chooser to search specific catalogs on your local machine and other computers on your network. While all the tools support Indexing Service searches through the Advanced Filters and the Indexing Service Chooser, Eluent Dir makes it especially easy to conduct Indexing Service searches on Path Plans.

Please see our Links page for information on extending Indexing Service with additional IFilter DLLs, which allow Indexing Service to index file types beyond common types such as Microsoft Office, HTML, and text files.