Microsoft window search indexer

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.

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. 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.

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 MB of text files, the index for those files will be less than 10 MB. In both cases, the index size will increase dramatically in proportion to the size of the files. Sydney Butler is a social scientist and technology fanatic who tries to understand how people and technology coexist.

He has two decades of experience as a freelance computer technician and more than a decade as a technologies researcher and instructor. Sydney has been a professional technology writer for more than five years and covers topics such as VR, Gaming, Cyber security and Transhumanism. Read Sydney's Full Bio. We hate spam too, unsubscribe at any time. Plus, how you can customize it. Table of Contents. Subscribe on YouTube! Did you enjoy this tip?

We cover Windows, Mac, software and apps, and have a bunch of troubleshooting tips and how-to videos. Click the button below to subscribe! Fixes For Windows, Mac, and Linux. Restart your PC. Please let me know what happens. Disclaimer: This is a non-Microsoft website.

The page appears to be providing accurate, safe information. Watch out for ads on the site that may advertise products frequently classified as a PUP Potentially Unwanted Products.

Thoroughly research any product advertised on the site before you decide to download and install it. How satisfied are you with this reply? Click here to download and start repairing. If you want to change your indexing options, you can choose which locations you want to index. By disabling certain locations from indexing, you might improve your performance.

To change this setting, do the following:. By doing this you can optimize your PC and improve your performance by disabling indexing for the directories that you rarely use. Take a look at this step-by-step guide to find a solution. If you want to improve your performance, you can disable indexing for an entire partition or hard drive.

To disable indexing for a partition , you need to do the following:. Sometimes issues with indexing can occur, and your search might become slow or unable to find the desired files. If this happens, your Search Index is most likely corrupted, but you can easily fix that. After doing that, you just need to wait for a couple of moments while Windows rebuilds your Search Index.