Configure Crawl Sources in sharepoint 2013

How to start a full crawl in Central Administration

Before you can start a full crawl in Central Administration, you have to specify which content source should be crawled. When you run a full crawl, all content in the content source is crawled even if that content has already been added to the search index.

For this scenario, we'll crawl the Local SharePoint sites content source.

1. Go to Central Administration --> Manage service applications --> Search Service Application -- > Content Sources.
2. On the Manage Content Sources page, hover over the Local SharePoint sites content source, and select Start Full Crawl from the menu.

The status of the crawl is shown in the Status column.

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

4. Optionally, you can verify that your items have been added to the search index by clicking Crawl Log.
   In our scenario, we now have 870 items in the search index, which is approximately the same amount of products we have in the Products list.

How to enable continuous crawls in Central Administration

You can only start a full crawl manually. Nobody wants the hassle of having to manually start a crawl every time a change is made to their catalog content, as this is neither an efficient nor practical way to work. So, to avoid this overhead, you can simply enable a continuous crawl of your content source that contains the catalog.

Continuous crawls start automatically at set intervals. Any changes that have been made to the catalog since the previous crawl, are picked up by the crawler and added to the search index.

To enable continuous crawls:

1. Go to Central Administration --> Manage service applications --> Search Service Application --> Content Sources.
2. On the Manage Content Sources page, click Your content source for which you want to enable continuous crawl, in our scenario case, this is Local SharePoint sites.
3. Select the option Enable Continuous Crawls.

How to set continuous crawl interval

The default interval for continuous crawls is 15 minutes. You can set shorter intervals by using PowerShell. The code snippet below sets the continuous crawl interval to 1 minute.

$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
$ssa.SetProperty("ContinuousCrawlInterval", 1)

So, by enabling continuous crawls, you can avoid a lot of frustration from content managers as they no longer have to wait for Search service application administrators to start a crawl for them. However, for some catalog changes, for example, enabling managed properties as refiners, continuous crawls are not sufficient, and you will need to do a full reindexing of the catalog content. But not to worry. Content managers have no reason for concern, because there is a way for them to initiate a full reindexing of the catalog.

How to initiate a reindexing of the catalog

To mark a catalog for reindexing, here's what to do:

1. On your catalog (in our case the Products list in the Product Catalog Site Collection), click the LIST tab --> List Settings --> Advanced Settings.
2. On the Advanced Settings page, click Reindex List.

How to view crawl status and schedule for a catalog

You can view the crawl status and schedule for an individual catalog. To do this:

1. On your catalog (in our case the Products list in the Product Catalog Site Collection), click the LIST tab --> List Settings --> Catalog Settings.
2. On the Catalog Settings page, you can see when the catalog was last crawled, and what crawls are scheduled to run when.
   In our case, we can see that the catalog was last crawled on 3/4/2013 at 5:30:17 AM, and that continuous crawls are scheduled to run every 15 minutes.

So, all in all, content managers can be happy because their content is added to the search index at short intervals, and Search service application administrators can be happy because they are no longer bothered by content managers constantly asking them to start a crawl.