Enabling Site Searching Using the Indexing Service

CAUTION

While using the Indexing Service can provide great benefits to those using your Web site, it can also provide an open door inviting unscrupulous visitors to perform various nasty things to your Web server and possibly portions of your internal network. Ensure that you have the most up-to-date security patches and hot fixes on your Web server by visiting the Windows Update Web site frequently. For more information on the specific Security Bulletin relating to the Windows XP Indexing Service, see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms02-018.mspx.

If you want to let remote browsers search your Web site for documents of interest, you can install and configure the Indexing Service. This service periodically scours selected Web-shared folders and documents and maintains a list of all the words it finds in them. It actually maintains two separate indexes: one of your whole hard disk, for your use alone, and another of the Web folders for Internet searching. It's also sophisticated enough not to show results for documents Web visitors don't have permission to download. To install this service, follow these steps:

1.	Right-click My Computer and choose Manage. From the Computer Management console, open Services and Applications, and then the Indexing Service section.
2.	Right-click Web, and select Properties.
3.	Select the Generation tab to bring it to the front (see Figure 13.6), and make the following choices: Check Index Files with Unknown Extensions to include more than the expected .html and .txt files in the index. If you check this option, the Indexing Service will attempt to make sense of every file it finds in your Web folders. Check Generate Abstracts. This option increases the size of the index in a large Web site but lets the search results return not only a filename but a paragraph or so of text from the beginning of each matching file. You can set the maximum size of this abstract if you want or leave the default setting of 320 characters. Figure 13.6. You can index generation properties for the Web index. Here, you can select the level of detail you want to include in the index.
4.	Click OK. The Indexing Service updates the index automatically.

By default, the Indexing Service includes the IIS documentation in its index. You might find this information useful, but visitors to your Web site probably won't. You can open the Directories pane and remove the IIS documentation by selecting all the folders except \inetpub\wwwroot and any virtual folders you have added, double-clicking them in the right-hand pane, and checking No for Include in Index?

When you specify a folder, all its subfolders are included as well. You can prevent them from being included by specifying a subfolder and marking No under Include in Index.

Enabling the Indexing service only prepares a database of all the words and documents in your site. It doesn't automatically provide your Web pages with a search feature. For that, you'll have to use a Web page editor that can work with the Indexing service through the FrontPage extensions. Microsoft's FrontPage editor, not surprisingly, can do this.