Does Sharepoint 2013 support IFilters?

Question

Earlier I asked how to register custom IFilters with Sharepoint 2013 and there're no answers. What bothers me is I can't even find evidence that IFilters are supported in this version. All the search results I have mention the fact that PDFs can be searched without installing a custom IFilter.

Maybe they are just no longer supported but I can't find definitive evidence.

Are custome IFilters supported by Sharepoint 2013 in the first place?

Answer 1

I guess custom IFilters are supported in SP 2013... refer this blog post for more details. In a nutshell you have to follow usual steps for SharePoint 2010 and then use New-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormat cmdlet.

Answer 2

There are many questions here:

1. Yes indeed PDF are natively supported by SharePoint 2013 Search so no real need to install another IFilter for PDF. Have a look here http://sharepointthing.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/sharepoint-2013-search-natively-supports-pdf-ifilter/
2. Yes, you can have custom iFilter still as there are used by "Content Processing Component" in the Search pipeline where document parsing occurs, while crawling items and feeds them to the index component (see more here http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2012/07/17/what-you-need-to-know-about-search-in-sharepoint-2013-preview.aspx) also on MSDN it is actually mentioned that for those unsupported you should work with vendors to get your iFilters http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607742.aspx

Answer 3

I might be completely wrong but I think custom iFilters are exchanged with Content Enrichment web service for SharePoint 2013.

Check this blog post out,

Customize the SharePoint 2013 search experience with a Content Enrichment web service

Did you ever wish you had more control over how your content is indexed and presented as search results? In SharePoint 2013, you have the option to add a callout from the content processing component to your own web service so you can manipulate the content before it gets indexed.

I never created a ifilter but I assume custom ifilters were suppose to be do same thing.