Search Index Not Consistently Indexing Contents

Hello, I think I have hit the limit of my knowledge with an issue I'm hitting and figured I would share in case anyone has any insights!

I'm currently running Windows 10.0.19042 on this machine.

I am using the Windows Search Index in a powershell script in order to help with some work that requires searching for guid references in a variety of plain text (YAML) files. I have used indexing options to set folders to index, exclude subfolders I don't want indexed, and set up plain text indexing for the target filetypes I want to search.

I've noticed consistently inconsistent results for a while. I've tried re-indexing but the results are still consistently inconsistent. What I mean is, certain search terms always return all expected files while will always exclude files that should have been found. It seems that some filetypes that contain search text work with all search terms (meta files in the example below) while others do not (prefab).

To confirm this is not just poor scripting on my part, I've tried using the explorer search and the results are identical to what I see returned from my powershell query.

This is a case of the index working as expected, with two results, a meta file and a prefab file. Apologies for all the marking out of files, just trying to keep some work somewhat private.


In this other case, the meta shows up but the expected prefab file does not


And, for thoroughness, the file contents that contain the same GUID in plain text that isn't appearing


Any help would be greatly appreciated! The inconsistency is what is throwing me off more than anything else and my lack of knowledge on how exactly files get indexes has me at a loss for how to continue. Feel free to request any additional information that would be helpful, I'm happy to follow up with more details.

Thanks!

Try resetting Windows Search by using the attached batch script.