Including Search for your website documents -Part 1

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Including Search for your website documents -Part 1

Search is an integral part of any website and particularly if your site has a large number of documents, providing a search functionality would enhance the quality of the website and easy access to documents.

Microsoft Indexing Services can be used effectively to implement search for your websites with less coding and configuration.

Indexing Services scan the Documents and provide an easy way for searching within documents. This built-in feature can be made use of effectively for implementing search functionality.

Configuring Indexing Service to Search within documents

1. Select "My Computer" and right click on it and select "Manage".

2. Expand the "Services and Applications" Node.

3. Select "Indexing Service" and right click on it.

4. Select "New" and then select "Catalog"

5. Enter a name for the Catalog.

6. Enter the location to save the Catalog and then click Ok

7. A new Catalog will be created under the "Indexing Service" Node.

8. Select the New Catalog and then Point to "New" and then
point to "Directory"

9. Point to the path where you store the Documents (Word, Excel, PDF) etc.,

10. Its enough if you point it to the Root of the folder and it would automatically scan the sub-folders.

11. Make sure you select the option Yes for the "Include in Index"

12. Right Click on the Catalog and select Properties

13. Switch to the "Generation" Tab and then select
"Index files with unknown extensions" and "Generate Abstracts" checkboxes.

14. Right Click on the "Indexing Services" Node and select "Stop"

15. The service will be stopped.

16. Now repeat Step 14 and select "Start".

17. The Service is started and the Documents get scanned.

18. It may take sometime to scan all your documents if you have a lot of documents.

19. You can test the Search by selecting the "Query the Catalog" under the Catalog you created.

20. It provides a textbox for entering search text and Button which would display the search results.

21. Now your Indexing Service is ready for searching your documents.

Read Part 2 for Using the Search Results returned by Indexing Service in your applications.