Starting with Windows Vista, search is a tightly shell-integrated component of Windows. A downloadable Windows Desktop Search software is available for Windows XP and older versions., Windows Search (formerly known as Windows Desktop Search or WDS on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003) is an indexed desktop search platform released by Microsoft for the Windows operating system.

Windows Search for Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 (also referred to as Instant Search) is a successor of the Windows Indexing Service, a remnant of the Object File System feature of the Cairo project which never materialized. Windows Search uses a different architecture and a new indexer compared to Indexing Service. For Windows XP, Windows Search is available as an add-on application.

Windows Search collectively refers to both Indexed Search on Windows Vista and later versions of Windows, and WDS on Windows XP. They not only share a common architecture and indexing technology, but also are API-compatible with one another.
Overview

Upon installation, Windows Search (and Windows Desktop Search) builds a full-text index of the files on a user’s hard drive. It does not by default index network drives, nor is it trivial to index mapped network drives even if the default settings are edited. Internet searches reveal many users who have been unable to do so at all, and solutions, if they exist, are obscure. It also, by default, creates the index on the local drive. The time required for the initial creation of this index depends on the amount and type of data to be indexed, and can take up to several hours, but this is a one-time event. Once a file

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