How to Configure Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013 – Part 2

In the previous post we learned about creating managed accounts required for Search, creating search service application and configuring search service application. In this post we will complete our enterprise search configuration. I will discuss about

Creating Content Source – In this we will see what is Continuous crawling

Creating Search center.

Then finally I will discuss about new Improvements in Search

Let’s begin then,

Create Content Source:

In the last post we have created search service application. Now it’s time to create content source to get the desired content displayed to the user.

Go to Search Central Administration and click on Content Sources under Crawling section.

From the Figure: Content Sources, you can observe that by default it will create Local SharePoint sites content source, but in actual scenarios we have to create individual content source for each web application. So, let’s create a content source.

To create it, click on “New Content Source” from the Figure: Content Sources.

Enter the details as shown in the below figures

-          Name: sharepointchampions.com

-          Select the type of content to be crawled: SharePoint sites

-          Type Start address below: http://sharepointchampions.com/

Leave the remaining setting as default as it shown in below Figure

Crawl schedules: Leave Enable Continuous Crawl. Create Incremental Crawl and Full Crawl based on your requirement. Please see below Figures for 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 be added to a list of content sources. For first time if you add a content source, by default Full crawl get initiate automatically.

Enable Continuous Crawls:

One new feature that is 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 crawl to complete, to see the contents in search; but now it’s no more an issue. Once the content is 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 means that you don’t require the incremental crawl because it has been set to “Enable Continuous Crawl”.
But to enable it you should have robust Infrastructure in place so that performance will not 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.

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

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

Create search center:

Basic search center:

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

While creating the site collection select “Basic Search Center” from the Enterprise. Click Ok. It will create a Basic search center.

Enterprise search center:

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

Figure: Enterprise Search Center

New improvements in search results page:

You have everything ready for search let’s start searching. Open the Enterprise Search center site collection. You can observe there are many new Improvements in Search results page. Please find below the details:

You have different options to search like (See below Figure):

-          Everything

-          People

-          Conversations

-          Videos

-          Reports

Below image is from basic search site, these options will be available in enterprise search as well. You can observe that under Result Type: 1 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.

The options for slider are one year ago, one month ago, and one week ago.

Once you select the document from the search results small popup opens where you can see

-          Document name

-          Document type

-          Last modified

-          Contributor

There are three more options: To Open, Send via email and View library to see the details of the library where the document or item is stored.

No more PDF Ifilters:

You don’t need to install the PDF Ifilter and make a lot of settings to search PDF documents in SharePoint 2013.

It is handled by SharePoint now, see above Figure, where I have uploaded a PDF document and it displayed for users without doing any configuration or settings.

We have created the Search service application, created the accounts required to create it and we have seen how search administration page looks and what the new changes in Search topology are. Then we created the Content source, while creating it we have seen new option called “Enable Continuous crawl”, then we created the Search center and what are the new changes in search results page.

Hope this post is useful to start the basic search configuration for your farm environment.

In coming posts we will see more about search changes in SharePoint 2013.

Enjoy the searching features provided in SharePoint 2013.