How to Search File Contents in Windows
Search File Contents Using Windows Search
Windows 10 is better at searching for files and folders than it’s older versions. It’s usually great at finding the file you need. However, there might be an occasion where the file you seek doesn’t come up.
This is because, by default, Windows search doesn’t look at the contents of every file type, nor does it scan files that haven’t been indexed. Here’s how to change both of those things.
About the Windows File Index
The Windows index catalogs information about your files, like the metadata and the words within them. This allows your computer to find things quicker it doesn’t have to scan each file individually, but can instead look in the index.
Many apps on your system use the index. File Explorer is the obvious place, but Photos, Groove, Outlook, and Cortana all use the index too.
The index updates automatically as the files on your computer change. It will take up roughly less than 10 percent of the size of the indexed files (so 100 MB of files will have an index of less than 10 MB).
While these methods will make your file search more useful, it’s worth noting that they can slow down the speed at which you’ll get your results. The more file types that have their contents indexed and the more folders searched, the longer it’ll take.
1. Change General Search Options
There are a couple of general options that you can change to enhance the file index and search.
Indexing Options
First, we’ll look at how to change some system-wide indexing options.
Open the Start menu, search for Indexing Options, and select the result. In the window that opens, click Advanced and remain on the Index Settings tab.
Beneath the File Settings heading, you can enable two options:
- Index encrypted files
- Treat similar words with diacritics as different words
The second refers to diacritics, which are also known as accents. Those are the little symbols or glyphs that appear on some words like café. Once you enable this, “cafe” and “café” would be treated as different words. This option is useful if you have many files in different languages.
Once done, click OK to save your changes.
File Explorer Options
Next, we’ll change how the search operates within File Explorer.
Open the Start menu, search for Change search options for files and folders, and select the result.
Here you can enable options for when searching non-indexed locations. These are:
- Include system directories (enabled by default)
- Include compressed files (ZIP, CAB, etc.)
- Always search file names and contents (this might take several minutes)
Choose what you want to enable, but the third is crucial if you want a thorough search of files and their contents.
Once done, click OK to save your changes.
2. Search For and Inside More Locations
Windows indexes locations like your Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos by default. If you like, you can add more locations to the index.
To do this, open the Start menu, search for Indexing Options, and select the result. This will open a window that shows you all the current indexed locations.
To add something to this list, click Modify > Show all locations. Use the Change selected locations section at the top click the arrow to expand a drive or folder, then place a tick in the box to index it. Once done, click OK.
3. Search Inside More File Types
By default, Windows only adds the file contents of certain file types to the index.
To change this, we again need to use the Indexing Options section. Click Advanced and switch to the File Types tab. Here you will find a list of most file types on your system, right down to the really obscure ones. If a file type isn’t listed, input it in the Add new extension to list text field and click Add.
If you click a common file extension from the list, like doc, look beneath the How should this file be indexed? section. You’ll notice that the file is indexed with the Index Properties and File Contents option.
Select a more obscure file type and it’ll likely just be set to Index Properties Only, which refers to metadata like the file name rather than anything inside it.
If you know what the file type is that you’re after, find it on the list and switch it so that it’s set to Index Properties and File Contents. Once done, click OK.
