Windows Search Indexer Status Gadget

by Brandon on April 9th, 2008

I’m pleased to announce that the second tool to join the BrandonTools.com collection is now available! It’s a new Sidebar Gadget for those who want to see what the indexer is up to and to easily control its behavior.

Click here for details.

Note that the screenshot depicts the gadget running on WS4. The "index now" button is not available on versions prior to Windows Search 4.

From → Life of Brandon

16 Comments

Eric permalink

Hey Brandon, nice gadget. That reminds me to ask you something about indexing. Will Windows Search 4 implement the ReindexMatchingURLs method of ISearchCatalogManager? It’s a huge headache needing to rebuild the entire index when all I want to do is reindex a specific file-type.
Artie Kay permalink

Schweet!

Thanks Brandon!
Greg permalink

This is more a question about the indexing process itself rather than your status gadget. In Vista SP1, let’s say I move a file that has been indexed and then wait until the file is again indexed in its new location. If I then perform a search, the file turns up twice in the search results, once in its new location and once in its old location. From the search results table, if I try to open the “old” file I get an error saying the file cannot be found. This behavior has persisted for over a week.

Doesn’t the indexer periodically check its contents for dead links and remove these from the index? Shouldn’t an attempt to open a search result that results in a file not found error trigger the indexer to immediately remove this dead link from the index?
Brandon permalink

Greg – as soon as you delete or move a file, the old entry should be removed from the index. It sounds like you’re hitting a bug, as that is not the normal behavior. One option would be to install the WS4 Preview release and see if it fixes the problem for you.

What kind of drive are you moving the file from? Is it NTFS? FAT32? A network location?
Greg permalink

I’m just moving the file from one location on the system drive (NTFS) to another.

In general, I don’t install beta or preview releases of anything. However, as soon as WS4 is officially released, I will be sure to try it.
Janson permalink

Hi Brandon,

Great tool, and I’m glad its finally seen the light of day. I called out your tools and addtional efforts you make in a recent beta event with MS. This tool is a great ‘power tool’ and it would be cool to see some others to give back to Vista users some of the rich functionality that exists in XP WDS. A samll question what does the number in brackets indicate when the index is updating? Items indexed per second????

Cheers

Janson
Anon permalink

gadget works only with en-us systems…
Brandon permalink

Anon – I updated it yesterday to work on all systems, and others have reported it works fine for them. Have you tried it since then?
matthew permalink

I have WS4 installed on two laptops. The first indexed 80,000 records in about a day. The second has been working for a week and only indexed 30,000 records. Is there a way to determine the performance problem and which files have been indexed and which are not. Any suggestion about the slow computer which is actually the newer machine and has a dual processeor? I have uninstalled and reinstalled once.
Marc F permalink

Brandon, excellent gadget, I love it! Amy chance of adding a button to launch the Search for files window? Thsi would make it the gadget more convient. Thanks again for creating this.

Marc
Marc F permalink

Also, I see another version of the gadget that has a search box (http://brandonlive.com/2007/01/04/building-a-windows-powertoy). Is there any chance this wil be made available to the public? It looks great and I would love to have it. I’ve emailed you a few times in the past but got no reply 🙁

Thanks and regards,
Marc
wim wender permalink

Great tool.
Workin like a charm on windows 7 64!

Thank you!
nimd4 permalink

IDK if you guys can get the download, which for me is missing from here and the m$ gallery; but, I’ve found it @ gallery-live.com/sidebar-gadgets/Indexer Status Gadget

=)