After you publish your WebHelp project the indexer scans all the files found in the HTML output directory and creates an index file. This index contains a list of all the words found and their locations in the files in your project.

When the user accesses the search function for the first time the index file is downloaded by the user's browser. All subsequent searches during the current session then access this local copy on the user's computer.

It's important to understand that the indexer scans all the files in your output directory! This means if you add your own files to the directory before you publish they will be scanned too.

If you don't want your own files to be included in the index you must add them to the output directory after you publish your project – or upload them to your server separately so that they cannot be indexed when you publish.

Normally Help & Manual doesn't delete anything in your HTML output directory. Since every topic is a separate HTML file in WebHelp the files for deleted topics are still in the output directory when you publish a new version of the project that no longer contains these topics.

To prevent this it's a good idea to use the Delete all files in output folder function in the Publish dialog when you publish a build for distribution. See Publishing for more details on this.

Full-text search uses an index of words found in the project, together with the locations where the words are found. This means that it is not possible to search for phrases because the index only knows about the locations of the individual words. Enclosing words or phrases in quotes searches for exact words (see below).

Enclosing one or more words in quotes searches for exact words. For example, entering cat will find cat, catalog and advocate, but entering "cat" with quotes will only find cat. This also works for groups of words – entering "cat dog fish" will only find the exact occurrences of all three words.

This can be combined with wildcard characters. For example, "cat*" will find catalog but not advocate.