In one aspect of the invention, a search engine parses files stored among one or more file servers in order to create and maintain index information used by the search engine to perform searches. For a given file server, the population of files presented to the search engine is reduced in size to facilitate the process of updating the index. In another aspect of the invention, the file server limits the files presented in a directory list request made by a search engine. This reduces the number of file s that need to be considered when performing an index update.