How To Add, Remove Index Locations In Windows 7

Sometimes when you search for text inside documents, Windows 7 may not return any results even though the search string may be actually present. This is because Windows 7 searches inside contents of only those files which are indexed. By default Windows 7 indexes only select locations on your computer including Libraries, Start Menu, User folders, Internet Explorer History and Windows Sticky Notes.

You can make Windows 7 always search inside file contents no matter whether the file is in an indexed location or not. However by using this method, searches are slow and you are not taking advantage of Windows indexing service’s speed optimized search. A better way is to add those folders to the index locations.

An alternative and easy way to get a folder indexed is to add it to a Library. Windows 7 automatically indexes all content in Libraries.

Here are the steps to add index locations:

1. Open Control Panel –> Indexing Options.

2. In the ‘Indexing Options’ window, click on ‘Modify’.

3. In the ‘Indexed Locations’ dialog, under the section ‘Change selected locations’ you can browse and select (check mark) all folders that you want to include for indexing on your computer.

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In case you are unable to find any location in this list, click on ‘Show all locations’ button which requires administrator login. This will list all locations for all users. For example Internet Explorer History and Windows Sticky Notes are now listed separately for all users on your PC.

4. All the selected locations are listed in the section ‘Summary of selected locations’.

5. Click OK to save your changes.

From now on whenever you search for text in any of the indexed folders, Windows 7 will do a full content search instead of the regular file name search.

In case you want to remove any folder or sub folder from index locations, simply clear the check box for that folder. In case you have included a folder but removed one of it’s sub folders, it should then appear in the ‘Exclude’ column in the section ‘Summary of selected locations’.