Google Drive for PC bug breaks Windows Search (and how to fix it)

Some of you folks like me, which use Google Drive for PC to sync your files with the cloud, may have noticed that Windows Search does not return results from files inside the Google Drive folder.

It's not Microsoft's fault though. The problem is that the Google Drive for PC sync service is not honoring the permission inheritance from its parent folder.

The SYSTEM permissions are not being propagated to files synced by Google Drive. This causes the Windows Search index to not have access privileges to the root Google Drive folder and all its contents.

There is no fix per se (that should come from Google), but there is a workaround.

UPDATE: It turns out you can solve the search issue in a relatively simple way, by just enabling inheritance at Google Drive's root folder.

To accomplish that you can do as follows:

1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. Go to your user's root folder.
3. At the right panel, right-click on Google Drive's root folder and click on 'Properties'.
4. Click on the 'Security' tab.
5. Click on the 'Advanced' button.
6. A new window will show up, it should be named similar to 'Advanced Security Settings for Google Drive'.
7. At the bottom of this window, there is a button and a checkbox.
8. Click on the 'Enable Inheritance' button.
9. Check the 'Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permission entries from this object'.
10. Click 'Apply'.
11. Click 'OK' to close this window.
12. Click 'OK' again to dismiss the Properties window.
13. Done.

Windows Search should start indexing the contents as soon as the permissions are changed.