Searching for files "containing text" does not search all files

The built-in Windows search functionality underwent some "improvements" between Windows 2000 and Windows XP. For one it changed from an economical search box to a wizard-based nightmare complete with resource-eating animated character by default (see the TechByte on disabling Windows XP search assistant if that irritates you as much as it did us).

Another "improvement" involves a crippling of searching for text within files. By default, Windows 2000 can perform a search for files Containing text on files of any type. Windows XP has limited this feature to "enhance performance" to files in one of four categories:

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) files
HTML 3.0 or earlier files
Microsoft Office files (Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint)
Plain text files

To search the contents of other file types you can enable the searching of files as plain text files. This can be helpful for searching the contents of other documents which may contain identifiable text (e.g. word processing files like WordPerfect). To do this you must have installed the Windows XP Application Compatibility Update, October 25, 2001, which is included in both Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2.

To enable plain text searching of all files, do the following:

Click Start -> Run.
Type ciadv.msc and press OK to open the Indexing Service console.
In the menu, click Action -> Properties.
Check the Index files with unknown extensions checkbox and click OK.
Close the Indexing Service window.

You can also enable this feature through the registry:

Open REGEDIT.
Browse to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex
Change the DWORD value FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions to 1. (This is a little counter-intuitive based on the registry value name, but I believe it is trying to say that by setting that value you are enabling the plain text "filter" (Query.dll) to scan all unknown extensions.)

You can also enable the contents of certain file types to be searched in this way -- see Microsoft KB article 309173 for full details.

Author: ASAK
Created: Nov 29 2005 (last modified Dec 15 2005)
Categories: Windows XP Home - Windows XP Professional
TechByte #95

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Comment posted by 'helenix' on Sep 13 2007 @ 11:34:48
very helpful indeed - thank you