I was wondering how Windows 7 searches the content of Word documents.
Does it use the same office COM objects used for automation (the ones VBA uses)? This would mean that your would not be able to search the content of office documents unless you have installed Office- is this correct?
Windows Search uses Filter Handlers, which are written to implement an IFilter interface.
Microsoft Windows Search uses filters to extract the content of items for inclusion in a full-text index. You can extend Windows Search to index new or proprietary file types by writing filters to extract the content, and property handlers to extract the properties of files.
No COM or automation, just a Filter for the document type.
Perhaps check out this related SU question for a bit of context: How to search inside PDFs with Windows Search?
