The idea is that as disk drives become cheaper, PC users tend to leave more stuff not organized in their computers. There is really no need to keep "everything" in order, just create a new folder and have a fresh start every time you feel lost. Especially whatever left behind is not something you use all the time but then again its important to find it when needed. So index search is created.
Google is well known for its searching capability so it is them who first came out with Google Desktop Search. Basically index search will first scan through your files and create a database about them. When you search something, it will read from the database first rather than searching from all the files and therefore the search result appears faster.
As usual, Windows followed suit, created similar function, build them into their OS distribution and claimed they have been having it since stone ages. Its just that they make it to public since XP. But their functions don't become stable until Vista and is really usable only after Windows 7.
One of the biggest problems of index search is to achieve its balance. If you think carefully, all it does is to search first or search in ahead of time, even before you need to search anything. Hence, its really a matter of wasting the resources first and then later give you the appearance that it is faster. If you are a guy who really doesn't search much, index search will basically waste more of your system resources.
In order to keep the index search database up to date, it will have to search anything that has recently been changed. So another process must be watching for file changes all the time. Again, wasting a lot of resources just to prepare to give you an illusion of speed.
For others who need index search, one of the biggest problems could be its speed. It may significantly slow down the system. When this happens, it is most probably you have enabled index search on the whole drive or even All the drives.
By doing so, you basically have created a duplicate of your original file system index. So searching from the new index is no different than the old index and yet the system will search both indexes. Hence slowing down the whole thing.
You should NEVER NEVER NEVER index search a whole drive. You should only index search your own stuff. Whatever directories and files you created yourself, those would be worth while to be indexed. The system already know where their system files are, there is NO NEED for you to help them index anything.
The #1 reason whey desktop search is slow is because users have enabled index search on the whole drive or all the drives.
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