IFilter to the rescue

Published 3 August 5 11:30 PM | Ramon Smits
I've used a couple of indexing applications in the past but I stick to MSN Desktop Search at the moment. The reason is simple and that is the availability of additional indexing plugins in the form of IFilters. IFIlters are com components that MSN Desktop Search can use to index other file types. The really interesting thing is that IFilters were already available for SQL server and Windows Indexing Service which ofcourse are tightly coupled.

My current additional set of filters scans for .pdf, .chm, .rar, .cab and .rtf and most originated from Citeknet. The pdf IFilter is from Adobe and the rtf from Microsoft.

Some file extensions are excluded from indexing which could be interesting for developers. So I suggest you to remove then from the exclusion textbox.

    .exe, .ini, .log, .manifest, .ocx

I added the following extensions myself

    .build, .config, .diz, .nfo, .proj, .string, .sln, .sql, .xhtml, .xsd, .vmc

MSN Desktop Search indexes xml files as text so you can't add extensions at the moment for xml content. The current indexing engine does not do a very good job with xml content. I hope that they will improve this.

Does anybody know of filters that can index the following information:

    (all) = All files indexed for their calculated CRC32 so you can find dupes much easier
    .vhd = VirtualPC harddisk files
    .iso (and related) = CD/DVD images
    [eventlog]
    [registry]

Comments

# Robert said on August 5, 2005 12:15 AM:

The search-engine of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (Index Server 'to da max') uses IFilters as well. Maybe the SharePoint community can help you with it.

Perhaps interesting, there are also IFilters for mp3(id3), gif, jpeg (exif) and all Office documents.

Do you actually have an IFilter for:
.build, .config, .diz, .nfo, .proj, .string, .sln, .sql, .xhtml, .xsd, .vmc? I would be really interested!!

# Ramon Smits said on August 8, 2005 3:20 AM:

Well MSN desktop search indexes office documents out of the box. Don't know about the mp3 but that is an interesting filter as well.

No I don't have a specific filter for those. But this way they get indexes on there content.

# Robert te Kaat said on August 15, 2005 10:52 AM:

Build your own iFilters: http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/FullTextSearchingIFinters.asp

Nice article. Also explains how to use full-text-search in SQL.