What is indexing? on the computer?

Question

What is indexing? on the computer?

Answer 1

Consider it the same as the index in a book. The computer uses the index to easily locate files/folders.. whatever, without having to do a search of the entire book... (hard drive).

Answer 2

it's when the computer gets all your file's names and puts them in a database, like what Yahoo does on their search engine

so when you search for something the computer can just look at the database which then can point to the right file instead of actually searching through your whole harddrive

Answer 3

it's when the computer makes a list of everything on your hard drive so when you search, it searches the list and not the entire hard drive.   It makes searching faster, but slows down the computer overall.

Answer 4

Indexing is a way for computers to help you search not only for folder and file names but within files for keywords you enter into a search program compatible with indexing. Oftentimes indexing is the background operation done by the computer to automatically catalog data in your hard drives during idle time. Spotlight on a Mac is an example of this indexed search feature. Microsoft Windows Desktop Search is another example. Beagle combined with the Desktop Search daemon for Linux is yet another example. It makes searches easier and quicker by looking at an index of the files on your hard drive instead of going through your hard drive one file at a time. The initial indexing of the hard drive (or areas of the hard drive of your choice) will be a long process. But once that's through any files added or deleted from the hard drive are automatically added or subtracted from the index. When you do a search for files the results come up right away as you type. Plug-ins are made to search within email databases, browser history and so on.