Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual

The Search Index

You might think that typing something into the search box triggers a search. But to be technically correct, Windows has already done its searching. In the first 15 to 30 minutes after you install Windows—or in the minutes after you attach a new hard drive—it invisibly collects information about everything on your hard drive. Like a kid cramming for an exam, it reads, takes notes on, and memorizes the contents of all your files.

And not just the names of your files. That would be so 2004!

No, Windows actually looks inside the files. It can read and search the contents of text files, email, Windows Contacts, Windows Calendar, RTF and PDF documents, and documents from Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

In fact, Windows searches over 300 bits of text associated with your files—a staggering collection of tidbits, including the names of the layers in a Photoshop document, the tempo of an MP3 file, the shutter speed of a digital-camera photo, a movie’s copyright holder, a document’s page size, and on and on. (Technically, this sort of secondary information is called metadata. It’s usually invisible, although a lot of it shows up in the Details pane described on Preview Pane.)

Windows stores all this information in an invisible, multimegabyte file called, creatively enough, the index. (If your primary hard drive is creaking full, you can specify that you want the index stored on some other drive; see Indexing Options.) This index serves both the TileWorld and the ...