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Some Facts and Fallacies about Windows SharePoint Search Service - WSS 3.0

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Recently during a troubleshooting of a WSS 3.0 Search issue I came to know some interesting things about WSS 3.0 windows SharePoint search service and thought of sharing the same with you.

When we start the Windows SharePoint Search service in WSS 3.0 a Search DB is created and we need to schedule the Indexing service during the configuration of Windows SharePoint search service. Unlike the Office enterprise search service in MOSS the WSS 3.0 search service doesn’t have the UI to start the full crawl or the incremental crawl. Based on the scheduled indexing service the crawl happens in WSS 3.0.

Sometimes during our troubleshooting in WSS 3.0 search we might need to trigger the crawl explicitly and don’t want to wait until the crawl happens with respect to the scheduled time set during the configuration. We wonder that how to start the crawl explicitly in WSS 3.0 , even there is no GUI option in WSS 3.0 search but we have a stsadm command to start the crawl in WSS 3.0. Following is the stsadm command to start the windows SharePoint search service crawl explicitly in WSS 3.0

stsadm -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart

The fallacy here about the Windows SharePoint search service is that the stsadm command says that it’s a full crawl but it triggers only the Incremental crawl. In WSS 3.0 we cannot reset the crawled content and do the full crawl again. Because the full crawl happens only once when we configure the Windows SharePoint search service and creates the search database. If we stop and start the Windows SharePoint search service then we need to create a new search database and the existing search database cannot be used.

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