Search Configuration in SharePoint 2013 A Search Center is a portal where you can search for content on your organization’s

intranet The Enterprise Search Center in SharePoint 2013 searches nearly everything

SharePoint crawls. That is the reason why its search results are labeled "Everything". But for specialized data or scenarios, we often want a specialized search experience to match. For example, "People" takes you to People Search, that returns only People results, displays them differently, and responds intelligently to certain people-related queries such as searches for a phone number.

FAST search technology, acquired by Microsoft in 2008, is at the heart of SharePoint 2013 Technologies and ideas from Bing and elsewhere have been added to the mix to provide a comprehensive set of enterprise search capabilities, with plenty of room for customization. It includes a rules-based query parsing framework. Pricing has not yet been formally announced, but it is generally assumed that this search functionality will be a standard part of SharePoint 2013.

A few words about how search works

1. Our content is stored in SharePoint 2013 lists and libraries. We use site columns to store metadata about each item.

2. When we crawl the content and the metadata, the information is processed and added to the search index.

3. In the search index, managed properties represent the content and metadata that we crawled.

4. The queries that we enter in our Search Center are sent to the search index, where the system tries to find matching results.

5. Any matching results are displayed in the Search Result Web Part in the Search Center.

Crawling Full Crawl

Incremental Crawl Continues crawl

Incremental Crawl (clean-up)Run by User: The content source created by user/Administrator and it is trigger/ scheduled by the user.

Full Crawl: Crawl full items Can be scheduled Can be stop and paused When required Change content access account Added new manage properties Content enrichment web service codes change/modified.

Incremental Crawl: Crawl last modified content Can be scheduled Can be stop and paused When required Crawl last modified content

Continues Crawl Index as current as possible. Cannot be stop and paused (Once started, a “Continuous Crawl” can’t be paused or stopped,

you can just disable it.) When required Content frequently changed (Multiple instance can be run in parallel). Only for SharePoint Content Source E-commerce site in crass site publishing mode. Run by System: The crawl run automatically by the timer job.

Clean-Up continues crawl (Microsoft definition): A continuous crawl does not process or retry items that return errors more than three times. A “clean-up” incremental crawl automatically runs every four hours for content sources that have continuous crawl enabled to re-crawl any items that repeatedly return errors. This incremental crawl will try to crawl the item again and then will postpone retries if the error persists.

You have to perform below steps to configure search in SharePoint 2013.

Create manage accounts required for search Create search service application. Configure Search service application. Create Content Source - In this we will see what is Continuous crawling.

Create Search center. New Improvements in Search.

To do that go to central administration page and click on security.

Click on Configure Managed accounts under general security. It will open below Figure : Registered Managed Account. Please enter the Username, Password. If you want to set the automatic password change click on the check box against the "Enable automatic password change" otherwise leave as it is and click ok. The account will get added to the list of managed accounts

Create search service applicationClick on "Manage Service Applications" under Application Management from central administration. Click on search service application from new service application list.

Scroll down a little bit more from the popup screen, then Select the create a new application pool and enter the application pool name as "SP-Search Query and Site Settings Web" and select the security account as "spsearch".

You have entered all the required values to create the search service application, hit the OK button.It will show the below dialog box "Please wait while your changes are processed for search service application".

It will the show the below screen as the final status of completion of creating the search service application application. Please see the below Figure.

To verify it you can go and check under the "Manage Service Applications" section you will have newly created "Search Service Application".

Configure search service application:Click on Search Service Application from the above figure to see the administration page details of search.

It will display the below figures.

By selecting various parameters under system status of search administration you can configure search.

You can observe that the "default Content access account" here is "SPSearch". Please see the below screen.

Second half of the search administration and main one is Search Application Topology. Please see the below screen there are four databases created by creation of Search service application.

Administration database Analytics Reporting Database Crawl Database Link Database

In SharePoint 2013 Analytics services also included in the search.  As I said before there are lots of changes in Search in 2013, we will cover each one of them.

Create Content Source:

We have created search service application successfully. Now its time to create content source to get the desired content show to the user.

Go to search central administration and click on content sources under Crawling section. 

Full Crawl

 The Manage Content Sources page, hover over the Local SharePoint sites content source, and select Start Full Crawl from the menu.

Refresh this page until you see that the value in the Status column is Idle. That means that the full crawl has finished.

Optionally, you can verify that your items have been added to the search index by clicking Crawl Log. In my scenario, I could see that there were 157,297 items in the search index.

Incremental Crawl:

Select the type of content to be crawled: SharePoint sites

Crawl schedules:

Leave Enable Continuous Crawl. Create Incremental Crawl and Full Crawl based on your requirement.

Please see the below Figures: Full Crawl schedule and Incremental Crawl schedules.

Figure:Full Crawl schedule-Once in a week i.e. on Saturday at 12:00 AM.

Figure:Incremental Crawl schedule -For every 5 hours.

After configuring both schedules click ok. New content source "SharePoint-Journey" will get added to a list of content sources. For first time if you add a content source by default Full crawl it get initiate automatically.

Enable Continuous Crawls:  

One of new features that got added in search in SharePoint 2013 is continuous crawl. In the previous versions of SharePoint whenever users upload the content they have to wait till the next incremental to complete to see the contents in search, but now it's no more an issue. Once the contents get uploaded into SharePoint details will get displayed as early as possible with this setting. 

If you observe the below Figure: Enable Continuous Crawl, while creating the content source the incremental crawl will get disabled. This itself says that you don't require the incremental crawl because it has been set to "Enable Continuous Crawl".

But to enable it you should have enough Infrastructure in place so that performance will get affected.

One more thing to note here  is if you set continuous crawl, while creating the content source for the first time it will show the crawl status as continuous crawl by default.

Please see the below Figure.

Figure:Disable Continuous Crawl.

Now we have created content source and have seen what is the purpose of Continuous crawl.

The next step is creating the search center where users will search the content that is required for them.

Create search center

Basic search centerTo create the basic search center go to create site collections from the central administration screen under Application management

Enterprise search centerTo Create Enterprise Search Center please use the same approach as a basic search center but we have to select "Enterprise Search Center" site template.

Basic Search Center: Contextual Search within sites and lists. Enterprise Search Center - Search Across Site collections and Web applications FAST Search - Enhanced filtering capabilities along with document previews and visual best bets.

New improvements in search results page You have different options to search like (See below Figure): Everything People Conversations Videos Reports

you can refine search based on document types like PDF, web page, word etc. Next one is based on Author: who created the document. Third one is based on Modified date: where you can change the search results based on

modified date. It can be changed using slider.