How to Configure Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013 - Part -1

In this series I will discuss about how to configure enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013 to provide excellent new search features available in the latest version of SharePoint in your SharePoint portal.

There are many improvements related to enterprise search in SharePoint 2013. We will see those soon in coming posts.

You have to perform below steps to configure SharePoint Search in SharePoint 2013

1. Creating managed accounts required for Search

2. Create search service application.

3. Configure Search service application.

4. Create Content Source – In this we will see what is Continuous crawling.

5. Create Search center.

6. New Improvements in Search.

In this post I will discuss about first three in the above list.

As usual we will start our steps from the central administration screen.

Create managed accounts:
Before creating and configuring the required search service application, we have to create the accounts which we use for enterprise search. Here I have an account in AD called SP_search. Now I will add this account as managed account.

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.  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 application:

Click 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 from the “Create New Search Service Application” popup screen, then Select create a new application pool and enter the application pool name as “SP-Search Admin Web Service” and select the account as “Venkatasuresh.n”.

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 “Venkatasuresh.n”.

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 then show the below screen as the final status of completion of creating the search service 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 are also included in the search.  As I said before, there are lots of changes in Search in SharePoint 2013; we will cover each one of them.

I will close on this for now. In the next post I will discuss about Creating Content Source, Create Search center, New Improvements in Search.