Do big images in ms word documents slow down windows explorer text search?

Question

Do big images (1-2 mb) in ms word documents slow down windows explorer text search?

Let just pretend i have a folder with 1000 ms word documents and each of them has 2-8 images each 1-2 mb big. Now i want to search for a specific word/sentence in the documents with the standard windows explorer search. Would the search be slower compared to the same amount of documents but the images are instead linked?

Answer 1

If the folder is not indexed, yes it will.

Windows Search (Windows Vista and later) does have a search filter for Word documents, and will search them for text. However, the time penalty has more to do with file size than there being images in them. At least with docx-files, I believe that it is significantly faster for Windows Search to search a Word document made up of a 1 MB image than 1 MB text, since it just needs to search the markup (xml) part of the document.

However, if the folder is indexed, Windows Search will only reference it's index of the folder, and not read the actual document files, wich would make the file size irrelevant.