What Is the Difference between Indexing by Reference and Indexing by Content?

When CES indexes a document by reference, it only records the file information (path, filename, and metadata). The purpose of indexing by reference is to be able to see and open documents in the search interface even when their type is not supported by converters or IFilters. Indexing by reference saves index space but of course, limits the precision of results because only the metadata and paths of documents can be queried.

Example: When scanned documents include useful metadata such as title, subject, description, date etc., you can index them by reference so that they can appear in search results for queries matching the metadata content.

When CES indexes a document by content, it records the file information and indexes the text content of the file.

Note: CES converters support several document types (see Supported File Formats). You can index other document types using open converters (see Adding an Open Converter) or using IFilters (see What Are IFilters?).