It’s the feature everyone loves to hate. Windows Search, the busy little background service that chews up your CPU cycles and thrashes your hard disk, is alternately revered and reviled, yet it rarely gets the attention it deserves.
On the plus side, Windows Search makes finding buried files, data, and — in the case of Vista — features and settings almost comically easy.
But for all its flash, Microsoft’s search offering has always felt a bit unfinished. The lack of centralized management tools, critical to enterprise IT administrators, and the perception that Windows Search could be as disruptive as it is helpful (for instance, client machines randomly “indexing” overburdened server shares at the most inopportune times) have so far relegated the technology to the guerrilla fringe.
Fortunately, that’s all about to change. Windows Search 4.0 is finally here, and it’s ready to enter the workplace as a well-mannered IT citizen.
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Plays well with others
For starters, Microsoft has extended Group Policy coverage of Windows Search functionality. Most importantly, you now can restrict searches against file shares and Microsoft Exchange message stores, the latter even if you’re running Outlook without an offline cache (i.e., an OST file).
You can also add your own in-house search server to the list of available Primary Search Locations. This new target option will then appear as a link in the various Windows Search UI components including the Deskbar and the Desktop Search results search box. Subtle changes, to be sure — however, combined with support for searching encrypted files and the ability to incorporate indices from other, networked systems, they make Windows Search 4.0 much more palatable for IT.
As for users, the UI for Desktop Search hasn’t changed significantly from earlier versions. Some users prefer the all-in-one nature of the XP version to Vista’s more distributed, integrated model. But while XP’s UI is more visually distinct, Vista’s search mechanism is actually more functional. In addition to searching for more object types, Vista lets you organize your search results using various filters, as in this stacked view.
Of course, Microsoft also took the opportunity to tweak performance a bit in this new version. Search engine CPU utilization (as measured by the Windows Sentinel Process Monitor widget), especially under Vista, has dropped significantly — as much as 34 percent in some instances. This, in turn, should allow Windows Search 4.0 to keep a lower performance profile, thereby addressing one of the major complaints against search under Vista: that it gobbles up too many CPU cycles.
Indexing performance was also supposed to have improved. However, testing under Vista Business (SP1) showed that it actually slowed by 17 percent. It took Search 4.0 a full 252 seconds to index a sample folder structure consisting of roughly 425MB of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio) data files, Adobe Acrobat PDF files, and a mix of text and Visual Studio source code files.
Speeds and feeds
By contrast, the original Windows Vista indexing mechanism took only 215 seconds. To add insult to injury, the Desktop Search 4.0 indexer on Windows XP did the job in 165 seconds — almost 53 percent faster than the same scenario under Vista with the Search 4.0 update applied. Plus, XP pulled off this feat while generating a lower CPU footprint than the original Vista-integrated search configuration, though the footprint of Desktop Search 4.0 on XP was not quite as small as that of Search 4.0 on Vista.
Testing was conducted on a Core 2 Duo (E6700) desktop with 4GB of RAM and 10,000-rpm disk. For the CPU utilization tests, we configured a base OS installation, including all relevant device drivers, and added the DMS Clarity Tracker agent from the Windows Sentinel site. We then copied the 425MB folder structure from a network share point to the Documents folder and monitored the system as the SearchIndexer and SearchProtocolHost processes kicked in and indexed the new content. For the raw indexing performance tests, we forced a re-indexing of the folder structure from the Indexing Options Control Panel applet and timed how long it took for the search engine to complete the job on an otherwise idle PC (no other user activity).
Overall, Windows Search 4.0 is nice improvement over Desktop Search 3.x under XP and the integrated search in Vista and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has managed to address most of the major objections to using Windows Search in the enterprise, including the lack of full manageability extensions for Group Policies. Combined with good overall search performance and an ultra-low price (it’s a free update), these enhancements make Windows Search 4.0 a no-brainer upgrade for any Windows IT shop.
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