Setup Sharepoint search? - sharepoint

For some reason my search in the sharepoint site does not work.
I have set up the SSP, the scopes, the crawls, everything but it still does not work
Can someone explain to me how to setup the search? Maybe I did something wrong in the process.

It's not the simplest thing in the world to setup, as it's comprised of a number of components.
You need to check each one to determine where your problem is.
Start from the crawl, and work your way forward to the search production on the page.
So check the following:
Check some servers have been setup to index pages. (You can see this under services on servers in the central administration pages.)
Make sure they're all running correctly. (Not in a half started state.)
Check your crawl log in your SSP to see if it is indexing anything.
(Index different types of content, like file shares, web sites, and sharepoint itself. (check each one.)).
(Note you need a special plugin to index PDF's.).
Check your index is copied to the front end server where it is used.
If it's not, it may be because this hasn't been configured, (Check Services running on servers again)
Then check your site collection setup, and ensure you have a search site configured.
Ensure the site collection search details are configured to use the search site.
Finally check the user doing the searching actually has access to the content being indexed.
Doing all of that should give you some idea of where the problem is.

In addition to Bravax's answer its worth checking that you are not getting stung by the local loopback check.

I had similar problem and ended up using search server express which is free (see my answer from this link: sharepoint 2010 foundation search not working)
I have installed search server express 2010 on top of SPF which works great. it has additional features and work well with sharepoint foundation. her is a link for upgrade and configuration: http://www.mssharepointtips.com/tip.asp?id=1086
You need to crawl the the contents source and add the website to it, then run full crawl to index data.

Related

sharepoint search problem

I'm working on a sharepoint project.
After I adding the search web part. The search function behaves weird.
I have crawled the content source and configured the permission.
The following search bar, no matter what I search, I got nothing
But the advanced search web part can work properly.
The thing is, in the result page of the advanced search web part, if I choose to see the result of my sharepoint website instead of "Any Site", I got nothing. I am sure that the result of "Any Site" is from my sharepoint site.
Any ideas will be appreciated.
Regards,
Bin
You need to check your search log to make sure content is being crawled correctly. It looks like you do not have any results for your a particular site. modify your search webpart to show the scopes drop down an experiment to find out which scopes are not responding correctly and debug from there.
You need to ask this question on serverfault.com or sharepoint.stackexchange.com as this site trys to deal with programming specific errors only.
It sounds like you might be crawling a non default zone. Maybe you're crawling an intranet or extranet zone. Make sure you crawl the default zone and that the default zone has NTLM authentication enabled and that the crawler has access to the web application via full read policy.
If this is SharePoint 2010 Foundation and you have named your documents_with_underscores, the underscores are not word breakers and as a result no matter what you search for "Documents" "with" or "underscores", in that case, would be successful. The word "with" would be removed by the content processor (search query and site settings service) in 2010 and the other two words would not be read as separate words because 2010 foundation would treat documents_with_underscores as one word. If you searched for "documents_with_underscores" you would find it.

SharePoint 2010 Search not working

I have installed and configured SharePoint 2010 to run on the same box as the SQL Server its running from in Windows Server 2008 R2. Everything is working fine except the search. I have uploaded several documents and tagged several items (documents, tasks, announcements etc), however whenever I search the site using the defaul search, i get nothing returned no matter what i search on, I simply get "We did not find any results for [search term]". I know there is setup needed if you wish to use "FAST search", but do I have to do anything to get the standard default search to work?
Found the answer on SharePoint.SE:
After installing the system you need to configure your indexing job.
Navigate to CA > Service Applications > Search.
You will see a link to your Content Sources. If you edit that it will give you the opportunity to setup a schedule for both Full and Incremental indexing.
You can kick off a full crawl, once completed you will have results if everything is configured correctly.
It does work for people search too . if you edit this content source you will see sps protocol which is for user profiles .
To make people search to work, in Central Administration > Manage Service Applications, make sure to provide a valid domain\user account as administrator in User Profile Service Application.
To add on to Chensformers answers, the account has to have "Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers" enabled. They have to have it in the Administrators button, even if the Permissions is set to Full Control! Quite misleading.

Sharepoint Search doesn't work

Platform: MOSS 2007 on server 2008
Sharepoint is working etc...
Problem: When you search for something, it doesn't find anything, no errors.
Authentication and permissions look fine. Search service is up and running.
What could be the problem? Any checkpoints I might have missed, any bad configurations I should check, etc...?
You should start with checking the crawl log files. That will probably give some valuable information.
Also double check that the SSP is set up correctly, with a valid content source setup, valid starting addresses, schedule etc.
Make sure that no crawl rules prohibit any searches.
And lastly, no 3rd party/custom security trimmers installed that prohibit results to be shown.
Doesn't work is not a lot of use is it.
My first guess is: Have you configured the search correctly (crawl schedules, content sources etc.)
To setup search (crawl etc.) go to the Central Admin site and then to your Shared Service Provider. in the SSP Select Seearch Adminstration. in the menu on the left you can find the link "Content sources". In the following page you can select the Content Source (something like "SharePoint sites" (out of the box). selct edit in the context menu and define your crawl schedule. Then select the "start a full crawl" checkbox.
You should make sure that you've indexed your site.

Delete a Web that doesn't exist

While setting up a test environment I was attempting to set up many different types of sites for testing various things when I ran into a strange bug in SharePoint.
I was creating a subsite under a blank site template and saw the option for "News Site" so I selected it and got an error saying that the Publishing Feature was not enabled at the site collection level.
Fine. So, I went and activated it and then attempted to create the site again and I got the error:
The Web site address "/mpsite/news" is already in use
Ok, so the site must have been created anyway so I try to visit the URL and get:
The webpage cannot be found
Fine. So, obviously it errored in the middle of the site creation so I'll just delete it via STSADM. Wrong:
There is no top-level Web site named "http://server/mpsite/news/".
So, the site is listed in the sites and workspaces list, but doesn't really exist and can't actually be deleted.
How do I get rid of it from the Sites and Workspaces listing?
You've run into one of the lovely undocumented "features" of SharePoint - site templates get applied after the site gets created in a seperate, descrete step. This means that potentially, a site can "exist" (as far as the content database is concerned) without template, which leaves you with a site you can't browse to, but still sorta "exists" in SharePoint purgatory (I've actually written a couple of hacks that involve relying on this "feature").
It looks to me like you may have run into one such situation - when you went to go create your site, I'm guessing that you got the error before the template was applied to your news site.
The way I've fixed similar problems in the past has been to use SharePoint Designer to delete the sites - since it looks straight into the content database for what does and doesn't exist, it might do the trick for deleting your rouge news site.
Hope this helps!
Have you tried http://server/mpsite/news/_layouts/deleteweb.aspx ?
Or maybe the "Content and structure" (http://server/mpsite/_layouts/sitemanager.aspx) link from site actions?
I know this is old, but it may help somebody. In SP2013 running the Remove-SPWeb Powershell command with the url of the corrupted web worked perfectly for me.

MOSS 2007 Crawl

I'm trying to get crawl to work on two separate farms I have but can't get it to work on either one. They both have two WFE's with an additional WFE configured as an Index server. There is one more server dedicated for Query and two clustered SQL 2005 back end servers for the database. I have unsuccessfully tried at least 50 different websites that I found with solutions from a search engine. I have configured (extended) my Web App to use http://servername:12345 as the default zone and http://abc.companyname.com as the custom and intranet zones. When I enter each of those into the content source and then try to run a crawl, I get a couple of errors in the crawl log:
http://servername:12345 returns:
"Could not connect to the server. Please make sure the site is accessible."
http://abc.companyname.com returns:
"Deleted by the gatherer. (The start address or content source that contained this item was deleted and hence this item was deleted.)"
However, I can click both URL's and the page is accessible.
Any ideas?
More info:
I wiped the slate clean, so to speak, and ran another crawl to provide an updated sample.
My content sources are as such:
http://servername:33333
http://sharepoint.portal.fake.com
sps3://servername:33333
My current crawl log errors are:
sps3://servername:33333
Error in PortalCrawl Web Service.
http://servername:33333/mysites
Content for this URL is excluded by the server because a no-index attribute.
http://servername:33333/mysites
Crawled
sts3://servername:33333/contentdbid={62a647a...
Crawled
sts3://servername:33333
Crawled
http://servername:33333
Crawled
http://sharepoint.portal.fake.com
The Crawler could not communicate with the server. Check that the server is available and that the firewall access is configured correctly.
I double checked for typos above and I don't see any so this should be an accurate reflection.
One thing to remember is that crawling SharePoint sites is different from crawling file shares or non-SharePoint websites.
A few other quick pointers:
the sps3: protocol is for crawling user profiles for People Search. You can disregard anything the crawler says about it until you're ready for user profiles.
your crawl account is supposed to have access to your entire farm. If you see permissions errors, find the KB article that tells you the how to reset your crawl account (it's a specific stsadm.exe command). If you're trying to crawl another farm's content, then you'll have to work something else out to grant your crawl account access. I think this is your biggest issue presently.
The crawler (running from the index server) will attempt to visit the public URL. I've had inter-server communication issues before; make sure all three servers can ping each other, and make sure the index server can reach the public URL (open IE on the index server and check it out). If you have problems, it's time to dirty up your index server's hosts file. This is something SharePoint does for you anyway, so don't feel too bad doing it. If you've set up anything aside from Integrated Windows Authentication, you'll have to work harder to get your crawler working.
Anyway, there's been a lot of back and forth in the responses, so I'm just shotgunning a bunch of suggestions out there, maybe one of them is on target.
I'm a little confused about your farm topology. A machine installed as a just a WFE cannot be an indexer. A machine installed as "complete" can be an indexer, query and/or a wfe...
Also, instead of changing the default content access account, you may want to add a crawl rule instead (once everything is up and running)
Can you see if anything helpful is in the %commonprogramfiles%/microsoft shared/web server extensions/12/logs on your indexer?
The log file may be a bit verbose, you can search for "started" or "full" and that will usually get you to the line in the log where your crawl started.
Also, on your sql machine, you may be able to get more information from the MSScrawlurlhistory table.
Can you create a content source for http://www.cnn.com and start a full crawl? Do you get the same error(s)?
Also, we may want to take this offline, let me know if you want to do that.
I'm not sure if there is a way to send private messages via stackoverflow though.
Most of your issues are related to Kerberos, it sounds like. If you don't have the infrastructure update applied, then Sharepoint will not be able to use kerberos auth to web sites w/ non default (80/443) ports. That's also why (I would bet) that you cannot access CA from server 5 when it's on server 4. If you don't have the SPNs set up correctly, then CA will only be accessible from the machine it is installed on. If you had installed Sharepoint using port 80 as the default url you'd be able to do the local sharepoint crawl without any hitches. But by design the local sharepoint sites crawl uses the default url to access the sharepoint sites. Check out http://codefrob.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7C69E7B2271B08F6!363.entry for a little more detail on how to get Kerberos & Sharepoint to work well together.
In the Services on Server section check the properties for the search crawl account to make sure it is set up, and that it has permissions to access those sites.
Thanks for the new input!
So I came back from my weekend and I wanted to go through your pointers and try every one and then report back about how they didn't work and then post the results that I got. Funny thing happened, though.
I went to my Indexer (servername5) and I tried to connect to Central Admin and the main portal from Internet Explorer. Neither worked. So I went into IIS on ther Indexer to try to browse to the main portal from within IIS. That didn't work either and I received an error telling me that something else was using that port. So I saw my old website from the previous build and I deleted it from IIS along with the corresponding Application Pool. Then I started the App Pool for the web site from the new build and browsed to the website. Success. Then I browsed to the website from the browser on my own PC. Success again. Then I ran a crawl by the full URL, not the servername, like so:
http://sharepoint.portal.fake.com
Success again. It crawled the entire portal including the subsites just like I wanted. The "Items in index" populated quickly and I could tell I was rolling.
I still cannot access the Central Admin site hosted on servername4 from servername5. I'm not sure why not but I don't know that it matters much at this point.
Where does this leave me? What was the fix?
I'm still not sure. Maybe it was the rebuild. Maybe as soon as I rebuilt the server farm I had everything I needed to get it to work but it just wouldn't work because of the previous website still in IIS. (It's funny how sloppy a SharePoint un-install can be. Manual deletion of content databases, web sites, and application pools seem necessary and that probably shouldn't be the case.)
In any event, it's working now on my "test" farm so the key is to get it working on the production farm. I'm hopeful that it won't be so difficult after this experience.
Thanks for the help from everyone!

Resources