My concern here is that this would be too subtle for the users. They are used to be able to search across any document in the view with an FTI. If you exclude certain documents in the view, then they'll call the Help Desk and claim that Notes isn't working. Why not just limit the view's selection formula or have an option and visual indicator to state that the current view is *not* FTI-enabled, or add a role to eliminate the ability for someone to enable the FTI on a particular view, versus the entire DB.

Is your goal to shrink the size of the FTI itself or something else?

Great idea, I think we should be able to exclude specific fields from the index using the field properties. For example you may use hidden fields on a document that store redundant data from a related document (parent or response) and it can confuse users to see these documents are a match for a word they can't see on the form.

My search engine has already the option to select only wanted fields for the index. That reminds me again to prepare the demo for Bruce :)

Generally speaking, I like this idea. Of course, this makes it a Partial-Text Index, doesn't it? However, for the mail purge application that my company sells -- which I won't blatantly self-promote by providing a link :-) -- this type of thing will cause problems as we (myself and my competitors alike) make use of FTI to find, report on, and purge documents that contain strings of data. This would also make any other app that uses FTI appear to be less then reliable. However, because I do see value in this I am going to promote it, but would very much like to see a flag set that indicates that this is in use so that any app relying on FTI can utilize a different searching method for dbs that have this function enabled.

What would be great if the Full Text Indexer service would automatically exclude documents with a specific field, like $ExcludeFullText...

The Full text search engine seems to be one of the neglected parts of the Domino/Notes platform, this is a big shame as in the early days the full text search capibilities were one of the selling points of Notes, but now users expect Google style searches and Domino comes up well short.

The obvious enhancements I can think of also include:

Option to exclude field from full text search - would users expect to find all emails when then do a search on 'memo' in their inbox.

Better control on document ranking - a simple enhancement woudl be allowing specified fields to have more importance (so that a match in the subject field would promote the hit more than a match in the body field)

Option to use Google style search syntax

For this in the Form and Subform properties have long had a special option "Do not add field names to field index".
For old design elements it is not actual, but for XPages - may be... so I vote neither for nor against.