In order to make searching for the files faster on a computer, Windows keeps running the indexing service on your computer. This file indexing service makes an index which is a database or catalog of all of the files on your local storage drive. So when you search for a file, the operating system does not search the actual file system but searches the index to give you the results really fast.
If you are looking for an alternative file indexing utility then you can try “Index Your Files”. It is a freeware tool to index and search through the files on the local media as well as on any other media. It is portable and extremely easy to use. The best part of using this tool is that once you have indexed the files from a media, you do not need the original media to search files on it.
“Index Your Files” has a tabbed user interface. We begin by selecting the “Index Menu” tab. Here we can create a new database. For each new database we can select the drives or folders to be included in the database. We can also choose to exclude certain folders from the database.
We can even schedule the indexing of files for this new database in addition to manually running the indexing. On my test PC running Windows 11, it took only 15 seconds to finish indexing the entire C: drive and adding all the files to the database.
Once you have created a new database, you can switch to the “Search” tab. Here you have to select a database from the list. You can now search for any file using wildcards. There are four types of search supported by “Index Your Files” – full search, classic search, fuzzy search, and sensitive search.
We can refine the search results by specifying the date and time filter for the files. We can also use text filter for narrowing down the search results. “Index Your Files” supports Unicode and we can type in any languages for searching the files.
You can download Index Your Files from http://www.indexyourfiles.com/.