Ubuntu – How to configure Tracker search indexing tool

Tracker is a search engine and metadata store that indexes your files to do all sorts of interesting things. See this answer for some usage basics.

It hasn't been installed by default in Ubuntu since Ubuntu 9.04; you must have installed it inadvertently. If you'll not be using it, you can remove it by removing the "tracker" package.

I know this is not really about tracker, but looking at your workflow (and thus answering an underlying question), I would definitely recommend taking a look at Mendeley. It's a scientific reference and literature database software, advanced search, full text search, tagging, annotating pdf's, automatic .bib files etc. It's what I use for managing my thesis' literature, and I love it.

Edit: Since this post was written, Mendeley sold (out) to Elsevier. An open-source alternative is Zotero.