We have developed our custom Windows Search Protocol Handler. The role of this component is to expose items of complex content (or unusual storage) to Windows Search.

You can think of some virtual folder, so a Protocol Handler allows to enumerate it's files, file properties, and contents.

The goal of our Protocol Handler is to represent some data structure as a set of xml files. We expected that if we found a data within a folder with these files, then a search within Protocol Handler's scope would bring the same (or almost the same) results.

Reality is different.

For some reason .xml IFilter (a component to extract text data to index) works differently with file system and with our storage. We cannot state that it does not work, but for some reason many words that Windows Search finds within a file are never found within Protocol Handler scope.

We have observed that if, for purpose of indexing, we represent content xml items as .txt files, then search works as expected. So, our workaround was to present only xml's text data for the indexing, and to use .txt IFilter (this in fact roughly what .xml IFilter does by itself).

Is there a conclusion?

Well, Windows Search is a black box probably containing bugs. Its behaviour is not always obvious.