I downloaded a whole resource ZIP of VMware vSphere PDF books from VMware’s website and was looking for something particular in the PDF files. There were 10s of PDF files and I didn’t feel like opening each one individually and searching so I decided to find a way to search them natively with Windows built-in indexing/search.
Turns out Adobe actually makes a search filter but on Windows 7 64bit it is not installed so you have to download the filter from Adobe’s website: Download Here
1. Download and extract the contents of “PDFiFilter64installer.zip” to your local drive.
2. Double click “PDFFilter64installer.msi” to launch the installer.
3. Follow the instructions in the installer wizard to complete the installation.
[tip]After installing the PDF iFilter, it is recommended that you set your system PATH environment variable to the “bin” folder of the “Ifilter” installation. For example, from the “Control PanelSystemAdvancedEnvironment Variables” tab, append to PATH “C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platformsbin” and then restart the computer.[/tip]
You can confirm it is installed by checking in Control Panel (Start -> “control” [ENTER]) then in the search box at the top right type “indexing options” and choose “Indexing Options” link then Advanced and then File Types and look for PDF.
iFilter Installed
Filter NOT Installed
Their iFilter is mostly broken with anything other than Window 7 indexing service making it useless for quality searching tools like FileSearchEX. But I guess broken is better than nothing.