Hi folks,We're getting ready to implement some a new public corporate web site, and this will end up hosted on a Server 2008/IIS 7 box. Up till now we've been using Windows 2000 (IIS 5) and Server 2003 (IIS 6) as the platform for our sites. As part of that we used the Index Server/Indexing Service to implement local site search.Now from what I've been reading, the Indexing Service is deprecated (and in fact depending on how you used it was broken) on Server 2008. So what out there replaces the Indexing Service for implementing local site search on IIS 7? I've already looked Search Server 2008 Express, and that does not look to be an appropriate solution.Any suggestions out there?Thanks,Scott

Hello,Windows Search Service is a new indexing solution that is included in WindowsServer2008 as a role service in the File Services role. It creates an index of the most common file and non-file data types on your server - such as e-mail, contacts, calendar appointments, documents, photos, multimedia, and other formats extended by non-Microsoft files. Indexing files and data types enables you to perform fast file searches on your server from computers running Windows Vista, or from computers running WindowsXP or Windows Server2003 with Windows Desktop Search installed.Indexing Service is an indexing solution that is included with Windows Server2008 and was part of previous releases of Windows. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965362.aspxhttp://trycatch.be/blogs/roggenk/archive/2007/11/05/windows-vista-amp-windows-server-2008-federated-search.aspx1) Start Server Manager 2) Click on Roles in the left navigation pane 3) Select Add Role in the Roles Summary pane to the right 4) Select the File Services role and click Next 5) Select the Windows Search role service Syed Khairuddin

Hi Syed, Thanks for the reply, but the solution you proposed is completely inappropriate for my situation. Let me stress, I'm looking for a search solution for a publicly available corporate web site. We have in the past used the Indexing Service to provide local site search capabilities from within the site (ie, someone comes to our web site from the internet and wishes to search the contents of the web site from their web browser). Being able to search our website's contents from internal corporate desktops is irrelevant. Is there a non-deprecated product that will provide this solution? Thanks, Scott

Hi Scott, As Syed mentioned, Index Services is still included as an optional role in Windows Server 2008. You cannot index Internet Information Services (IIS) Web sites in Windows Server 2008 because of the design changes that were made to IIS 7.0. The catalog that you use for the Indexing Service still has the Tracking tab. However, the catalog does not save any changes that you make to the WWW Server setting. To work around this issue, add the Web site folders to the catalogs in the Indexing Service snap-in as physical folders. Then, edit the scope registry entries for the folders. To make the scope return a virtual path, change the value from ,,5 to ,,3 . For more information, please refer to the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article: 954822 How to install and configure the Indexing Service on a Windows Server 2008-based computer http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;954822Laura Zhang - MSFT

This reply is to an old string, but I am currently running into issues with Windows Server 2008 and Indexing Services and Windows Search Service. I have tried both Indexing Services and Windows Search Service and have gotten them both working on my server (one at a time of course). I am trying to create a search page for a website hosted on the server under IIS 7+ I need the search page to display results matching a users search term and allow users to see various properties of the matching files in question, including their virtual path within the website - so the user can click on the link and go to the page they feel is what they are looking for. So //contact/index.aspx for example. All I can seem to get displayed for results from IS and WSS is the physical path, so something like C:/contact/index.aspx. I'd prefer not to use Indexing Services as it is deprecated but I have tried the ,,5 ,,3 trick and didn't see promising results....my catalog size shrunk from over 200 to 3 and no properties were returned then - maybe I wasn't pulling the data in correctly after this change to scope? I do not see, nor have I found any WSS property which returns the virtual path property I am looking for. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Nicole

Check this similar thread in IIS forum. Hope this will help you.

MYousufAli thanks for the response. I've seen that other thread before and sounds like mostly the same issues I've had, no real solution. Hopefully someone else has ideas? Nicole

maybe not a service, but this might help? http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5981/Internal-Site-Search-Engine