- backup your data and database (just in case something goes wrong)
- copy search_files folder into Drupal modules folder
- go to /admin/build/modules
- enable "Search Files API"
- also enable "Search Files in Attachments" if you want to search files attached to nodes
- also enable "Search Files in Directories" if you want to search files in arbitrary directories
- go to /admin/settings/search_files
- configure "Helpers". These are external applications which do the actual plain text extraction
- configure "Attachments" (if used), everything optional
- configure "Directories" (if used), must configure at least one directory, everything else optional

- notice the dashboards, they give you some insight of what's going on
- the dashboards offer a "Update index" link which runs the search index build process immediatly

- please note that only "Directories" one attempt is made to build the index
  for directories, then no more activities will be executed until a
  configurable pause of "Directory Rescan Age" is gone.  A problem often
  encountered is that the Helpers do not work correctly and after their
  configuration is fixed still nothing happens because of the "Directory Rescan
  Age" timeout. During setup phase you may reduce the timeout to as low as one
  second.

- when searching for attachments the results present two links, one for the
  attachment and another one for the node where the file is attached.

- when searching for files in directories the results present a link to an
  arbitrary URL whose prefix is configurable per directory. You may well scan a
  directory /usr/home/example and setup an FTP server with URL prefix
  ftp://example.com/ which serves exactly this folder. The configuration of the
  server providing the URL is outside the scope of the Drupal module.

- uninstallation of the modules wipes out all dedicated tables, configuration
  settings and every search index data from the Drupal database.

