Windows Search is a content index desktop search platform by Microsoft introduced in Windows Vista as a replacement for both the previous Indexing Service of Windows 2000 and the optional MSN Desktop Search for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, designed to facilitate local and remote queries for files and non-file items in compatible applications including Windows Explorer.
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Windows Search creates a locally managed Index of files — documents, emails, folders, programs, photos, tracks, and videos — and file contents, as well as of non-file items including those of Microsoft Outlook for which users can perform incremental searches based on details such as authors, contents, dates, file names, file types, people, and sizes; the Index stores actual prose from inside documents and metadata properties from other content.
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Windows Search was introduced in Windows Vista as a replacement for the previous Indexing Service to facilitate data discovery and management, promote greater rapidity of search results, and to unify desktop search platforms across Microsoft Windows; it was available as an optional download for Windows XP.
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Windows Search is the successor of the Indexing Service, a remnant of the Object File System feature of the Cairo project which never materialized.
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Windows Search creates a locally stored index of files and non-file items stored on a computer.
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Once a file's contents have been added to this index, Windows Search is able to use the index to search results more rapidly than it would take to search through all the files on the computer.
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Windows Search uses property handlers to handle metadata from file formats.
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The most important component of Windows Search is the Indexer, which crawls the file system on initial setup, and then listens for file system notifications to pick up changed files in order to create and maintain the index of data.
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Windows Search queries are specified in Advanced Query Syntax which supports not only simple text searches but provides advanced property-based query operations as well.
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Windows Search provides implementations of the interface to convert an AQS or NQS queries to their SQL counterpart.
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Windows Search service provides the Notifications API component to allow applications to "push" changed items that need indexing to the Windows Search indexer.
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In Windows 10, Windows Search was added to the taskbar in place of the Start menu in earlier versions of Windows.
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Windows Search index is built locally on the PC and no information is sent to Microsoft.
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