Configuring Windows Search (File Content Search) For Citrix and Windows 2008 R2 \ Excluding Indexing from Windows Search

In Windows 2008 R2, Windows search has Indexing in built or as a part of it with some default file\folders inclusions. Other Indexing role is for Legacy OSs.
In Windows Server 2008R2 Search in file content is not enabled by default and can be enabled by installing the File Server > Windows Search Service role.

Once the Windows Search Service is installed file searches on shares hosted on Windows 2008 R2 file servers can be off-loaded to the file server thereby conserving XenApp server resources. Users App data folder, Start Menu and Internet Explorer history will be also indexed….. and this is where the trouble can start:
  • The Search database file C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb may grow very large – a “normal” size seems to be around 40 MB and a large DB can be 4 GB.
  • The SearchIndexer.exe process has high disk I/O

We decided to only allow file searches as it seemed the main cause was indexing of above mentioned contents. The follow group policies fixed this issue:
Computer Config/Admin Templates/Windows Components/Search
  • Prevent indexing certain paths
    • iehistory://{*}/
    • mapi://{*}/ (in case of Outlook issue)
    • c:\Users
    • c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

Note: There is no way you can stop the indexing to the feeds. The feeds comes dynamically as and when you access the websites. If you want to disable the feeds from indexing you need to stop the Feeds from being indexed.

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