Indexing Service stores all of its index information in catalogs. A catalog comprises index information and stored properties for a particular group of file system directories. When Indexing Service is installed with Windows 2000, it automatically builds a catalog, called the System catalog, listing contents of all permanently attached disk drives. The System catalog contains an index for all documents except certain system and temporary files. If Internet Information Services (IIS) is installed, Indexing Service also creates a Web catalog which contains an index of IIS, the default virtual server of the World Wide Web.
The scope of these catalogs is the set of directories that are included in them and excluded from them. You can control which directories to include in or exclude from a catalog. For each directory that you include or exclude, all of its subdirectories are also included or excluded. For more information about including or excluding directories from catalogs, see To include or exclude a directory from a catalog For information about creating catalogs, see Creating catalogs
The index includes the content of each document, except for words on the exception list (such as articles, prepositions, pronouns). To view the exception list, see Exception-word list The content of a document includes:
The size of the index, which accounts for most of the size of a catalog, is about 15 to 30 percent of the total size of the documents that were indexed.
Document properties represent the characteristics of the document, such as date created, author name, and size. Property values are the specific information for a particular document. Some property values are set automatically by the program that creates the document; others are entered by the user. For some documents, such as those produced by Microsoft Office, users can create their own custom properties. Authors of HTML documents can create custom properties in meta tags.
All properties and property values are indexed with the document contents and can be searched. Most properties can also be displayed in the list of search results. However, some properties, such as those in the meta tags of HTML documents, must be stored in the property cache when the document is indexed. Otherwise, Indexing Service will not be able to retrieve them for display in the results of a search. You can specify which properties are to be saved in the property cache if the default selection does not meet your needs.
To view the properties to be stored in the property cache, see To view properties cached for a catalog
To add properties to the property cache, see To add a property to the property cache