Trick to Hide Inappropriate Content from Windows Vista Search

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 your private documents and files,want to hide from other users. But with such a powerful search engine, how will you protect your innocence in Windows Vista? Here’s a few tips to hide your documents from Windows Vista Search:

Exclude from Windows Vista Search Indexer

Tackling the problem from the soul of the searching beast. By excluding folders from the Windows Vista 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 orbs and search for “index options”
• Click the “Modify” button.
• Click the “Show all locations” button, agree to UAC(User Account Control) prompt.
• Expand the “Change selected locations” tree at the top. Find your inappropriate folders.
  For example: D:\Users\Pictures\vaibhav.jpg
  
• Uncheck the folder(s) you wish to exclude from search.
• Verify your folders have been excluded in the summary below.
• Close appropriate dialogs
  

Change the Folder attributes in Windows Vista

An alternative to digging inside the Windows Vista 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.
• Uncheck “Index this folder for faster searching.
• Click “OK”, and close other windows.

Change the File attributes in Windows Vista

Perhaps you just have that special file or document you wouldn’t like to share with the users, but the rest is public domain? Then you can exclude individual files from the Windows Vista search index with a very easy step.

• Right click on the file you wish to flag for non-index. Click “Properties”.
• Click the “Advanced” button.
• Uncheck “Index this file for faster searching.
• Click “OK”, and close other windows.

Here’s a comparison of the before and after effects by changing file attributes in Windows Vista. It really works!