Editing Desktop search (section)

=== Windows ===
[[File:Lookeen_Desktop_Search_-_Screenshot_of_the_Software.jpg|thumb|[[Lookeen]] desktop search on Windows]]
[[Indexing Service]], a "base service that extracts content from files and constructs an indexed catalog to facilitate efficient and rapid searching",<ref>{{cite web|url=https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee805985%28v=vs.85%29.aspx|title=Indexing Service|publisher=Microsoft|work=microsoft.com|access-date=24 June 2015}}</ref> was originally released in August 1996. It was built in order to speed up manually searching for files on Personal Desktops and Corporate Computer Network. Indexing service helped by using Microsoft web servers to index files on the desired hard drives. Indexing was done by file format. By using terms that users provided, a search was conducted that matched terms to the data within the file formats. The largest issue that Indexing service faced was the fact that every time a file was added, it had to be indexed. This coupled with the fact that the indexing cached the entire index in RAM, made the hardware a huge limitation.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd582937%28v=office.11%29.aspx|title=Indexing with Microsoft Index Server|publisher=Microsoft|work=microsoft.com|access-date=24 June 2015}}</ref> This made indexing large amounts of files require extremely powerful hardware and very long wait times.

In 2003, [[Windows Desktop Search]] (WDS) replaced Microsoft Indexing Service. Instead of only matching terms to the details of the file format and file names, WDS brings in content indexing to all Microsoft files and text-based formats such as e-mail and text files. This means, that WDS looked into the files and indexed the content. Thus, when a user searched a term, WDS no longer matched just information such as file format types and file names, but terms, and values stored within those files. WDS also brought "Instant searching" meaning the user could type a character and the query would instantly start searching and updating the query as the user typed in more characters.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/techfaq.mspx|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110924212903/http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/techfaq.mspx|title=Windows Search: Technical FAQ|archive-date=24 September 2011|publisher=Microsoft|work=microsoft.com|access-date=24 June 2015}}</ref> Windows Search apparently used up a lot of processing power, as Windows Desktop Search would only run if it was directly queried or while the PC was idle. Even only running while directly queried or while the computer was idled, indexing the entire hard drive still took hours. The index would be around 10% of the size of all the files that it indexed, e.g. if the indexed files amounted to around 100GB, the index size would be 10GB.

With the release of [[Windows Vista]] came [[Windows Search]]  3.1. Unlike its predecessors WDS and Windows Search 3.0, 3.1 could search through both indexed and non indexed locations seamlessly. Also, the [[RAM]] and [[CPU]] requirements were greatly reduced, cutting back indexing times immensely. Windows Search 4.0 is currently running on all PCs with [[Windows 7]] and up.