Many apps in the Microsoft Store also depend on the index to provide up-to-date search results for your files and other content.

Cortana uses it to provide faster search results from across your PC. Microsoft Edge uses it to provide browser history results in the address bar. File Explorer, Photos, and Groove all use it to access and track changes to your files. Many of the built-in apps on your PC use the index in some way. For example, Outlook 2016 adds all emails synced to your machine to the index by default and uses the index for searching within the app. For files with text, their contents are indexed to allow you to search for words within the files.Īpps you install may also add their own information to the index to speed up searching. What information is indexed?īy default, all the properties of your files are indexed, including file names and full file paths. A fully built index can return answers to searches such as 'Show all songs by Coldplay' in a fraction of a second, versus the minutes it could take without an index. Much like having an index in a book, having a digital index allows your PC and apps to find content faster by looking for terms or common properties such as the date a file was created. How does indexing make my searches faster? After that, indexing will run in the background on your PC as you use it, only re-indexing updated data. When you first run indexing, it can take up to a couple hours to complete. When you search your PC after indexing, it looks at an index of terms to find results faster. Indexing is the process of looking at files, email messages, and other content on your PC and cataloging their information, such as the words and metadata in them. Indexing the contents of your PC helps you get faster results when you're searching it for files and other things.

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