Article Rank Determined By Indexing Service

Knowledgebase version 8.0.4 and earlier.

The Microsoft Indexing Service is a Microsoft Windows 2000 base service for file systems and Web servers. Formerly known as Index Server, its original function was to crawl and create a catalog of the content of Internet Information Services (IIS) Web servers. Indexing Service now creates catalogs for the contents and properties of both file systems and virtual Web sites.

The Knowledgebase uses the Microsoft Indexing Service to return the search results of Articles. The Indexing Service also ranks articles based on the number of times it appears on the article, density and size of the current catalog. Additionally, adding Priority Keywords helps in the process of ranking articles.

As an operating system component, Indexing Service targets the same wide range of customer scenarios that Windows targets. Indexing Service targets the user's desktop and provides an enhanced search experience for individual users over information stored on local disks. Indexing Service is exposed in Windows when you click the Search button in the Start menu, when you press CTRL+F, when you click the Search button in Windows Explorer, and when you click the search task pane in Office XP.

Indexing Service exposes management and query objects that allow rapid development of custom search applications. Indexing Service catalogs can be expanded to contain information from remote file shares. Such custom applications can serve vertical applications or groups of users and can crawl information from multiple locations. Indexing Service also offers full-text search from Internet sites. Indexing Service can be used to drive custom search Web applications. In addition to query language support, Indexing Service offers a full range of programmability features targeting the custom application developer: scripting objects for query and administration, an OLE DB provider, and ADO compatibility.

Search Features

Data Access: Indexing Service does not include a cross-protocol gathering component. It can access any data that is available from the file system, including local file systems and shared file systems on remote computers. Indexing Service facilitates indexing of Web site content by using the IIS metabase to understand which files are mapped to Web site content. Indexing Service then follows the information from the IIS metabase to crawl the local Web sites. Indexing Service does not use the HTTP protocol to crawl Web sites. Therefore, Indexing Service cannot crawl content that is rendered dynamically, such as ASP pages referencing a database or personalized content that changes for each user.
Filters: Indexing Service uses filters installed on the operating system, including the MIME filter for news and e-mail, the Office filter for Office documents, and the HTML filter.
Ranking: Indexing Service uses ranking algorithms based on the vector space model. Information about the specific algorithms is included in the Platform SDK. The default algorithm used is the Jaccard formula.

For more information about Indexing Service's ranking formulae see this article.  

 Schema support Indexing Service provides rich, broad schema support. Using Microsoft Management Console (MMC), users can view all properties indexed from documents and can indicate which properties to stored in the property cache for fast retrieval.

 Extensibility and programmability. Indexing Service provides a platform for full-text search applications. It includes a full set of programming interfaces: scripting interfaces for administration and query, and an OLE DB provider for search. More information about Indexing Service programming interfaces is available in the Platform SDK.

 Query languages Indexing Service provides rapid access to files through flexible querying language. Indexing Service supports Query Dialect 1, Query Dialect 2, and SQL full-text extensions.

A list of features new to Indexing Service 3.0 (provided with Windows 2000) is available in the Platform SDK.

Indexing Service is the performance solution for custom application development to provide full-text search over content of an Internet site. It is less appropriate for applications where the data is primarily structured. Such applications should consider Microsoft SQL Server 2000. For out-of-box ease of use, or for applications that require aggregation of content from various sources and source types, SharePoint Portal Server is the appropriate choice.

Indexing Service is an optional operating system component. Initial indexing of file system contents can be resource intensive and can affect desktop application performance. Therefore, Indexing Service is not enabled by default.

See Also:

How EXACTLY does Indexing Service determine rank

Other Usage Rules

Configuring and Troubleshooting Indexing Server And Building Web-based Query Pages

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