With great power comes great responsibility. Windows Vista comes with an amazingly powerful search engine that finds your documents, photos, music, movies, emails, applications and even sensitive materials in milliseconds. Some documents are never meant to be found, such as private collections of Steve Jobs keynotes, Laura Foy videos or even my secret stash of Tux penguinography. But with such a powerful search engine, how will you protect your innocence in Windows Vista? Here’s a few tips.
Exclude from Search Indexer
Tackling the problem from the soul of the searching beast. By excluding folders from the search indexer, you will permanently remove any existing indexes on that folder and prevent any future indexes inside that folder. This is recommended for permanent collections that don’t move around.
- Launch the “Indexing Options” dialog by clicking the Start pearl and search for “index options”
- Click the “Modify” button.
- Click the “Show all locations” button, agree to UAC prompt.
- Expand the “Change selected locations” tree at the top. Find your
appropriateinappropriate folders.
For example: D:\Users\Long\Pictures\Tux Collection - Untick the folder(s) you wish to exclude from search.
- Verify your folders have been excluded in the summary below.
- Close appropriate dialogs.
Folder attributes
An alternative to digging inside the search index is to flag specific folders to be not indexed. This works better for folders that move frequently, but does not guarantee an 100% result, sometimes leaving small traces of folders or files inside the folders.
- Right click on the folder you wish to flag for non-index. Click “Properties”.
- Click the “Advanced” button.
- Untick “Index this folder for faster searching.
- Click “OK”, and close other windows.
File attributes
Perhaps you just have that special one picture of Tux you wouldn’t like to share with the world, but the rest is public domain? Then you can exclude individual files from the search index.
- Right click on the file you wish to flag for non-index. Click “Properties”.
- Click the “Advanced” button.
- Untick “Index this file for faster searching.
- Click “OK”, and close other windows.
Here’s a comparison of the before and after effects by using file attributes. It really works!
Although it’s probably not a good idea to store penguinography in the “Pictures” folder to begin with.
And before anyone states the obvious, I acknowledge OS X has had a powerful search indexer and search tool (Spotlight) for years.
Comments for "How to hide inappropriate content from Vista search"
Rowan Lewis
That is just plain awesome!
http://digg.com/software/How_to_hide_inappropriate_content_in_Vista
dEiluss
hahaha…
LMAO long very long…
nice spiderman copy
heres Long Zheng’s plagiaristic side
presenting you Long Zheng “the plagiarist”
VistaFreak NT
CENSORED! lol… good one!
Darren
Thanks Long! Helps me!
BTW, what Vista are you using? It looks.. different than the other CRP Vistas…
Long Zheng
I’m using the one and only Vista you can get.
tino
http://shellrevealed.com/forums/thread/5596.aspx
Thanks for this but could you also explain how to delete files within the “Previous Versions” feature?
suril89
Haha, you are a riot Long. But, thanks for the info.
GRiNSER
os x got spotlight because of longhorn concepts o_O
Ely
Useful information, thank you for posting Long.
Darren
I use RC1 Long, is that the one you have? Damn! Took 3 days to download…
Zim
Wow
I love Vista a bit more each day
What am I going to do with the Google Desktop now?!
Brandon
Is there a way to hide pictures from the Windows Photo Gallery?
David
Any suggestions on what to do if there are files you want to protect or hide such that other can’t find them. I’ve used software from http://www.spydex.com that worked pretty well on XP. Ideally, I’d like to be able to protect them with a password vs just the selection of an option in windows that another use could simply reactivate. The other issue that i’ve seen with trying to hide files is that sometimes you will use a program to lock and hide a file and while you can’t then find it in the explorer view, you can often access it from either the a programs “most recent files” section or the “recent items” menu from the start bar.
Alex
Hi there, i have tried all the above options, and it still comes up with the files. the folders were originally not indexed, but if you do a search for it, it still tracked them down, and that’s without even clicking the “include non-indexed, hidden” and such files. is there a way to overcome this? including once the search is checked to look for non-indexed and such files? Cheers
Heybwoypuretrubleyuahgi
Yes I am still finding the files. But thanks for your effort
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