I was getting frustrated with the speed (or lack of) of Windows Search within Windows 10 lately. I went over to my Indexing Options - just hit Start and type Indexing Options - and was surprised to see that there was over 1.5 MILLLION items indexed! That seems like a big number. Why so large?
I checked my "index these locations" list and didn't see anything weird, but I did note that Indexing does include c:\users\YOURNAME by default. That seems reasonable, because it is reasonable.
However, I also noted that I had a LOT of ".folders" (dot folders) under my C:\users\YOURNAME folder adding up to a few gigs of config text files, caches and general crap.
I was able to significantly lower the number of items indexed from over a million to a reasonable 215k items just by excluding (un-checking) folders that I knew didn't matter to me as much.
Go to Indexing Options and click Modify:
Go to your C drive (or wherever ~\YOURNAME is) and go to your top level User folder. I unchecked a bunch of the stuff that didn't matter to me.
For average users this won't matter, but for developers who install a bunch of utilities, have their Dropbox or OneDrive in the c:\users folder, a 5 min audit of your indexed files can give your Indexed Files a nice refresh.
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