1. Where to find the Indexing Service Console:
Click on 'Start', 'Programs', 'Administrative Tools' and then 'Computer Management' (shown above in Fig.1).

If the Indexing Service is not installed, follow the tutorial here to install it.

2. Creating an Indexing Service for your Site:
The Computer Management console contains configuration options for a range of tools including both the Indexing Service and Internet Information Services. Click on 'Indexing Service' under 'Services and Applications' (Fig.2).

3. Creating a new Catalog:
Right-click on 'Indexing Service' and select 'New' and 'Catalog' from the list that appears. You will be presented with the Dialogue box shown above in Fig.3 (above).

Give the catalog a name that other Administrators can understand. In this case 'intranet', the same as that used for the IIS configuration.

The 'Location' is the location of the catalog, NOT the location of the site. You can put the catalog anywhere you like, this particular one is going in a subdirectory called 'intranet' under 'catalog' (I have already added these directories, see 'What you need before you Start' at the top of this document).

Press 'OK' to continue, note that the server will inform you that the 'Catalog will remain off-line until service is restarted'. This is fine, you will restart the service later.

4. Configuring your Catalog:
All you have created so far is a catalog, now you have to tell the server what your new catalog is for. Right-click on the name of your new catalog (in this case 'intranet') and select properties. You will be presented with the dialogue shown below.

5. Linking your Catalog to a web site:
If you link your catalog to a web site ("WWW Server" as shown above), the Indexing Service will automatically add the correct directories to your catalog and you can skip section 6 below. This means that all content within the site will be available to search.

If you prefer to manually specify which directories are indexed, you should skip this section and go straight to section 6.

To link your catalog to a web site, click on the 'Tracking' tab and change the 'WWW Server:' to the name of the site you want to index. Leave all the other settings as they are.

You may also need to take a look at the "Generation" tab and ensure that "Generate Abstracts" is checked (you may have to uncheck "Inherit above settings from Service" first).

6. Adding (or Excluding) Directories to/from your Catalog:
If you have not linked your Catalog to a Web Site (Step 5 above), you will need to manually add the directories you wish to search. You can add as many as you like and these can be either local directories or UNC shares.

To add a directory, expand your Catalog in the left-hand pane and right-click on "Directories". Select "New" and "Directory". Then, simply browse to the directory you wish to add.

To exclude a directory, simply check "No" for the "Include in Index?" option. This is particularly useful if you have added a directory and need to exclude one of it's subdirectories.

Repeat this process for all required directories.

Note: If you opt for this method, the Indexing Service will not create "Virtual Paths" and you may find that document links are broken on your search page. This problem does not apply to ASP Search for Index Server or ASP.NET Search for Index Server as they both automatically detect and parse document links.

7. Generating Abstracts:
Abstracts (also known as Characterizations) contain the first 320 printable characters of each document within the search Catalog. These are useful in providing a sample of the document contents within the search results without users having to open the document itself.

The Indexing Service does not generate Abstracts by default. To turn this feature on, you will need to select the "Generation" tab and check the "Generate abstracts" checkbox as shown above.

Note: You may need to uncheck the "Inherit above settings from Service" to do this.

8. Start Cataloging:
Now that you have correctly configured your Indexing Service you need to begin cataloging the contents of your site. To do this you must first right-click on 'Indexing Service' and select 'Stop'. Alternatively, you can just click on the black 'Stop' button in the toolbar at the top of the dialogue box. Leave the Indexer for a second and then repeat the process, this time clicking on 'Start' (or clicking on the play button in the task-bar).

The Indexing Service will be restarted and you should see the document count rising slowly (as shown in Fig.6 above).

9. Checking your index is working correctly:
To check that your Indexing Service is running correctly you need to submit a test query. Microsoft provide the administrator with a simple way of doing this.

Click on the + icon next to the name of your Indexing Service (in this case 'intranet'), then click on 'Query the Catalog'. The 'Indexing Service Query Form' appears in the right-hand window (as shown above in Fig.8)

Enter a simple query and press submit, choose something that's likely to be present in a large number of documents (such as the name of your company). Information is also a good word to use as it appears somewhere in almost all document groups.

Check to see whether the search has returned the expected results (see below).

10. The working search results:
Having submitted the query, the expected results are returned (Fig.9). This confirms that the indexing service has started and is working correctly.

11. The completed dialog box:
Your completed dialogue box should look something like Fig.9. The "Total Docs" indicated at 1816 sounds about right for our Intranet and so it's safe to assume that it's stopped Cataloging and everything is working as required.

If you need your index to kept fully up to date at all times, or if you find that the Indexing Service is handling a particularly large amount of queries - you may need to tune your performance settings. To learn how to do this, take a look at the "Indexing Service Performance Tuning Tutorial" here.

The next stage is to add a search facility to your site... you can either write one yourself or get a "Ready made" script/application using either of the links below...

• ASP Search for Index Server
• ASP.NET Search for Index Server