Microsoft Indexing Service

Indexing Service is the base search service for file servers and web services that is provided with Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows 2003. Formerly named Index Server for Windows NT 4.0, this search service was originally developed as an adjunct to Internet Information Server (IIS), the Microsoft web server that shipped with the server operating system. It has since been expanded to index documents in the file system as well as web pages.

Indexing Service extracts content from files by means of a software filter and constructs an index to speed up searching. It uses the IFilter interface, which it shares with SharePoint Portal Server.

The Search option in the Start menu uses Indexing Service as do search pages on IIS web sites. With the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), you can start, stop, and pause the service as well as define catalogs, as shown in Figure 13.2.

Figure 13.2. Indexing Service Management Console View

Indexing Service is powerful and highly programmable. It has its own software development kit with documentation that can be downloaded from msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/indexsrv/html/ixuwebov_4i0j.asp. The SDK includes numerous additional components for interacting with the Indexing Service, including ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) methods , ISAPI extensions, OLE DB Helper functions, and OLE DB provider for use with Visual C++.

By default, Indexing Service is not enabled when the operating system is installed. You must start the service manually. This is part of Microsoft's security effort to avoid use of unnecessary services on a server and therefore reduce the target area of servers for attacks.