Full-text Search on PDFs on Windows Sharepoint Services (64-bit)

Setup:

Windows Server 2008 64-bit
Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0
Search Server 2008 Express

Problem:

You’ve search the Web, followed all the instructions, installed Adobe iFilter three times, configured your registry settings, and you still can’t search within PDFs.  You can search for PDFs if the query string is included in the filename, but that’s not really that useful; you want to be able to search within the documents.

Solution:

Ensure that you are using the 64-bit (v9) edition of Adobe’s iFilter.  After that is installed, you need to change the following registry key:

KEY: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf

VALUE: {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}

After you do a full crawl, search should now be enabled per site.  To enable it for Search Server, you also need to update the following key to the same value:

KEY: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf

VALUE: {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}

The previous value was 4C904448-74A9-11D0-AF6E-00C04FD8DC02.

Search should now be enabled for all Sharepoint sites.