When you look for your car keys in a hurry, do you make a note of everything
in the room that ISN'T your car keys? Of course not. You know what they look
like and anything that couldn't possibly be your car keys (stuffed animals,
your partner's jacket, a bowl of corn flakes, the cat...) is quickly passed
over because your priority --of course-- is to find your keys as quickly as
you can.
A local search for a particular file, or even a wildcard specification works
the same way. It quickly passes over everything which, in broad strokes, can
be ruled out as NOT what you're looking for. The focus of the local search is
on finding the specified item(s) and getting the location information to you
as quickly as possible. The only reason it looks on the U:\ drive is because,
for all intensive purposes, it's a local drive.
In actuality, your U:\ drive isn't local at all. The indexing of that drive
would be initiated locally (by whatever machine the actual hardware is
physically attached to.) If the indexing service isn't running on that
machine or if the drive is excluded from the index maintained by that
computer, there's nothing you can do to change that. Even if it *is* running
and the drive *is* part of that computer's index, a local search from your
computer won't have access to the results of that index. It's not indexed by
your machine, therefore --to you-- the drive has not been indexed.
Does that explain anything?
Sam French
