
I haven’t manually messed with any of these settings, so this is typical on a Windows 10 machine out of the box with Office installed and a POP3/IMAP or Exchange Server account setup in Outlook. On my machine I’ve got Internet Explorer History, Outlook, and various folder locations included. The indexing service contains a master list of what we call “scopes” that identify the file system paths the service will crawl, which paths we will ignore, and other data types that applications have registered on the machine for indexing. What you see right away is a list of “Included Locations” and “Excluded Locations”, and these behave exactly as they read. In case you were ever curious on how the service decides what to put in the index this dialog shows you the list it uses to determine what data gets indexed. Inside the indexing options dialog you’ll find an array of settings and options that you’re able to configure. You can also directly get to the indexing options by searching directly in the windows search box. You will need to change this to “small icons” in order to see everything there is, including the indexing options. When you open the control panel the default view uses ‘categories’ to display the control panel options. Note: You must be logged in as an administrator account to take full advantage of the settings for the Search Indexer. The Good Old Control Panel AppletĪround since Windows Vista, the desktop control panel applet for many releases was the typical go-to location for looking at and updating Search Indexer settings. When I say default configuration, I’m simply referring to how the Search Indexer operates by default on a fresh copy of Windows 10. There are many ways applications can directly change Search Indexer settings, and of course users themselves can also modify the index. Let’s first take a look at the default configuration. How to Make the Most of Search on Windows.Configuration and Settings 👈You Are here.In this article we’re going to take a high-level look at the configuration and settings for the indexing service, and what some of these options really mean. This is part 2 of an initial 4-part series discussing everything search indexer related on Windows.
