Moss 2007 PDF search

Moss 2007 out box feature doesn't supports the searching of pdf documents. The search is works fare enough in case of word documents and html, aspx pages and blah blah.

search the pdf files one need to install PDF IFilters 6.0 version. But which works only with x32 bit

I had really tough time with my production machine when i came to know that PDF search is not working. I cracked my head even though i had PDF IFilter is in place in Production machine. Its working fine in Development and Testing boxes. I googled a lot and finally i found a solution. Foxit PDF IFilter x64 bit which acts as a plug-in for full-text search engines.

Before intalling make sure that you have done with the following steps. 1. Goto Central Administration 2. Click on shared services and goto Search settings 3. Click on File Types and add new File Type as PDF

Lets see how it works........
Step 1, the search engine go through a designate place, e.g. a file folder or a database, and indexes all documents or newly modified documents, including PDF documents, in the background and create internal data to store indexing result.
Step 2, a user specify some keyword he would like to search and the search engine answer the query immediately by looking up the indexing result and respond to the user with all the documents that contains the keyword.
During Step 1, the search engine itself doesn't understand format of a PDF document. Therefore, it looks in windows registry for an appropriate PDF IFilter and finds the Foxit PDF IFilter. Foxit PDF IFilter understand PDF format. It filters out embedded formatting and extracts text from the document and return text back to the search engine.
Key benefits:
Integrates with existing operating systems and tools within your company
Provides an easy solution to search within PDF documents located on local computer, local network and intranet
Greatly increases your ability to accurately locate information
Much smaller and faster than IFilter offered by other vendors
Support Chinese/Japanese/Korean PDF documents .

Please note that this installer does not register with MOSS 2007 by default. That means that after you install it, MOSS will not use it to index pdf files. This could be fixed manually with some registry tweaking:
After you install the Foxit, add a pdf extension in MOSS search settings Open regedit, locate [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf] Change the default value to {987f8d1a-26e6-4554-b007-6b20e2680632} . (You can get this handler addin value using Citeknet ifilter explorer)
Cmdline: net stop osearch
Cmdline: net start osearch
Do a full crawl.