We are currently thinking about to enable Server Side Windows Search to speedup the search done by clients on Network shares.
Put to a test the performance is better, without doubt - but with having Windows Search enabled, the overall result is worse in terms of quality.
Assuming a search is done for the keyword RMC
Regular Search, traversing through all files and folders will take some time, but finally come up with a resultset that is quite logical, i.e.:
- Folders, containing the word
RMC
(in their basename) - Files, containing the word
RMC
(in their basename)
After enabling Windows Search, and waiting for the Index to be build and performing the same search - the result is stunning fast, as in "no time" - But the result is really bad. It is now made of:
- Folders, containing the word
RMC
(in their basename) - Files, containing the word
RMC
(in their basename) - Files with content
RMC
(this is desired or a nice to have) - Every f**** folder that is a subfolder of any folder named
RMC
even if that folder is in no way related to the keyword beside beeing a child in an infinite depth.
Is there a way to change this behaviour?
I.e. P:\Pictures\RMC\a\b\c\d\e\d\f\thisOne - I don't want to have thisOne
(or a,b,c,d....) as part of my result list, just because its a subfolder of RMC
Combination where we observed this is Windows Server 2019 / Windows 11 if that has any impact maybe. (But Search itself on the server shows the same weird result)
Sure, it's a match on the folder's fullname
- but as you can imagine this blows up the search result by a huge number of entries that are basically unnecessary.