WindowsIndexSearch

Beginning from Windows Vista until Windows 10, Windows stores the Search

index inside an Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) database located at

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Application\Windows\Windows.edb. For

Windows Server 2008 until Windows Server 2022, Stroz Friedberg observed that

the database was structured the same way, but that Search Indexer was not

enabled by default. The service is enabled by default on non-Server Windows

versions.

In Windows 11, this data is stored in the same directory, but the single ESE

database is replaced by SQLite database files called Windows.db and

Windows-gather.db