How many ways can my Windows Search Break? Answer: Lots of ways!

Windows Search not working properly is getting quite a lot of attention at the moment, so I thought I would share my 2c worth - as one of the things that breaks the search is the presence of Adobe Acrobat, and this appears quite extensively in corporate installations, and that is not getting as much attention as to the being the source of your problems. Check your iFilters!

If you Google "Windows Search not working" you will come up with page after page of advice on how to fix it. This is a very complicated and old system inside Windows, and it CAN break in many ways, but here, in addition to advice you can find with the help of Google, are a few more things to check (and fix).

Check if you have enough space for the index files - the default location is your system drive, and this can get quite full in a hurry. If you suspect it is a problem, change the location of the index. A good rule is to make sure your boot drive (C:) is always at least 50% empty.

Have you installed Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader?

This is a big one because it can give Windows Search serious indigestion - the indexer relies on special plugins called iFilters to help it parse a file to create an index to be able to search it quickly. If you have installed Adobe Acrobat or other 3rd party PDF readers or editors, it is possible that the iFilter for PDF's got broken (and it can "break" in dozens of different ways). If it "breaks", it really messes with the indexer causing it to either stop working completely or slow to a crawl.

If you have verified that the PDF iFilter is not working, you need to install the 64-bit version from here: ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobat/win/11.x/PDFFilter64Setup.msi - this file goes back to 2008 - it has not changed at all. There is also a 3rd party iFilter from https://www.foxit.com/downloads/. Remember you have to stop the Wsearch service before you install the iFilter

IFilters are important as they are also used by SQL and Exchange on servers to perform full-text searches on the contents of documents.

Give up and install another Search Service

Sometimes trying to fix the Microsoft Service is just too challenging especially since Microsoft has also admitted there are problems, and an easier route would be to look at another indexer - unfortunately, the good ones are not for free - but here are some:

Copernic - works very well, but their customer service appears to be terrible, not that I have needed it - the application works well and is quite intuitive. Initial index is not very fast and be careful - it puts the index store on Drive C:

Agent Ransack - also works really well, and seems to have good after sales service.

DTSEARCH - this is a forensic indexer - it can index ANYTHING and is very fast indeed but the UI is clunky.