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I'm maintaining a classic ASP app on a Windows Server 2003 / IIS 6.0 setup. It has no code written to use the built in Indexing Service on the box, but the Indexing Service is turned on and actively indexing the default web directory.

I'm wondering if it is safe to turn off / uninstall the Indexing Service because its starting to take up a lot of space on the C drive of the server (1.8 GB)

From what I can tell this is a safe thing to do based on some limited Google-ing. But I would also like to know if IIS is using the Indexing Service at a low level that I'm not aware of.

I would even settle for a link to some recent documentation on IIS 6.0 and Indexing Service, and how IIS really uses it. The links im finding are all pretty old.

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It's absolutely safe to either remove (via Add/Remove Programs) or just disable the Indexing Service if you're not actively using it. In fact, removing it is "The Right Thing(tm)" to do if you're not using it.

As far as docs go, some of the old things you find will still be valid. The Indexing Service is venerable-- it dates back to IIS 4.0 and the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack. It's actually a pretty interesting piece of code and can do some fairly neat things (uses NTFS ACLs in filtering search results for users, has pluggable file format filters, pluggable noise-word and word-breaker funtionality) but never really gets used because, I believe, Microsoft did a poor job of making it do anything out of the box. (It could well have been the foundation for an enterprise distributed "desktop and server search" if Microsoft had ever put any effort behind it...)

The Platform SDK section for Indexing Service is probably your best bet for learning more about how it works.

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