After pushing out Google Desktop Search to a few departments, I received scattered complaints that searches were coming up with nothing, even if the exact document name was being mentioned (eg, search terms “Policy Manual” and the document is named “Policy Manual”).
I did a little digging and found that although all of the XP systems were working, none of the Vista computers (32 bit or 64bit) were. Huh. At first I thought that maybe the GPO hadn’t hit some of the computers, but then found that all of the effected Vista computers were in the same OU as the working XP ones (also evidenced by GDS being installed in the first place).
Checking the GDS options, all of them reported that the network location (\serversharenamehere) had a status of ‘Crawl not yet started’. Now, before you jump down my throat screaming “GDS doesn’t search network drives”, let me clear this up: it does. All of the XP systems had happily indexed the same network location, just none of the Vista systems had.
After playing around a little bit, I found the answer.
GDS waits until the computer is idle before attempting to crawl it’s list of allowed locations. The problem is, in Vista, Windows Search (which is built-in) does the same thing, and seems to always do so before GDS gets a chance to start. Therefore, because Windows Search is indexing, the system is no longer idle and GDS won’t crawl.
To fix this, I simply stopped and disabled the Windows Search Service and left the computer to idle. Sure enough, no more ‘Crawl not yet started’ message. Success!
