IsSearch - is a client part of the full text search system Microsoft Windows Indexing Service which can help you to do the following:

• launch and stop Indexing Service;
• organize catalogs, index and query them;
• get the search results in a table format with the possibility to sort by columns;
• preview the found document in the built-in web-browser window with highlighting of the sought-for terms.

System requirements: IsSearch is a search utility based on Windows Indexing Service built-in the Windows 2000 or Windows XP. The user of IsSearch should have one of these systems installed and also system administrator rights to manage the system service.

Full-text search system. The most common approach to full-text search is to generate a complete index for all of the searchable documents. For each word (excepting stop words which are too common to be useful) an entry is made which lists the exact position of every occurrence of it within the database of documents. From such a list it is relatively simple to retrieve all the documents that match a query, without having to scan each document. Although for very small document collections full-text searching can be done by serial scanning, indexing is the preferred method for almost all full-text searching.
Google.com, Yahoo.com are the examples of web-oriented full-text search systems. You can use Indexing Service for search files on local computer or local network.

Indexing Service is a Microsoft Windows base service for file systems and Web servers. Formerly known as Index Server, its original function was to index the content of Internet Information Services (IIS) Web servers. Indexing Service now creates indexed catalogs for the contents and properties of both file systems and virtual Webs. Indexing Service is designed to run continuously and requires little maintenance. After it is set up, all operations are automatic, including index creation, index updating, and crash recovery if there is a power failure.

Indexing. Full-text indexes are created automatically. Indexing Service reads every word of every document and creates an index of words and their locations in the database. End-users can search the database using any words they want to. Indexing Service will find every match between the search terms and the text of the documents.

Catalog is a folder that contains indexes. Indexing Service merges the extracted information into catalogs of indexes for efficient searches. By default catalog System is located in a hidden folder System Volume Information and contains indexes extracted from all root folders of computer.

Filter (or content filter) is a dynamic-link library (DLL) that includes an implementation of the IFilter interface for a specific class of files. The filter extracts text and properties from documents for placement in the Indexing Service index. Once this content is in the index, you can query the index to find occurrences of the requested content in the filtered files.

Third-party developers of filters for Indexing Service:

• Adobe PDF filter (There is also a small article about Adobe IFilter)
• 4-share: A filter for extracting content of ZIP files
• Citeknet: Extracting content of ZIP, RAR, CHM, CAB, HLP, MHTML, Self-Extracting Executable (EXE) files based on MS-CAB, RAR or ZIP archives
• Aimingtech: JPEG IFilter allows Indexing Service to index text metadata in JPEG (JFIF) files