SharePoint 2013 Search Magics -> Continuous Crawling

What is Crawling?

There are 3 methods can be used within SharePoint 2013. They are Incremental crawl (default schedule is 4 hours), Full crawl (default schedule is 4 hours) and most importantly Continuous Crawl. Crawling is the process of analysing content from "content source/s" and make available for Search results.

What is Continuous Crawling?

Continuous crawls crawl SharePoint site frequently to keep search results fresh. Continuous crawl will happen in 15 minutes interval. Ultimately users can configure this time interval from 1 minute to 15 minutes

Continuous crawling interval re-configure (put any minutes from 1 - 15 in parameter "n")

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


Disable continuous crawl

$SSA =  Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
$SPContentSources = $SSA | Get-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlContentSource | WHERE {$_.Type -eq "SharePoint"}
foreach ($cs in $SPContentSources)
{
  $cs.EnableContinuousCrawls = $false
  $cs.Update()
}

SharePoint Search Refinement Panel

Hi Guys,

You may like to learn more about search refinement panel and how to use it.

Scenario:

Think that your client have several departments and each department having seperate documents to be use. Each department is a site collection and these specific documents residing in a document library called "Department Docs". So client asking for search refinement to implement.

My steps will be like below:

1.Create a Site column for holding departments, type : choices
2.Check the Document library residing in side the department site collection
3.Add the column to the default view of the document library
4.Add several documents to the library
5.Do a incremental crawl to the content source, through Central Admin-> Application Management -> Search Application-> Content Source
6.Wait till crawl completes
7.Create Managed Meta Data property
8.Do a full crawl
9.Create a Enterprise Search Centre page
10.Modify the page and Edit Refinement Panel webpart
11. Modify below category markup and save the webpart

<Category Title="Departments" Description="Departments docs" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator" MetadataThreshold="0" NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="3" MaxNumberOfFilters="20" ShowMoreLink="True" MappedProperty="Departments" MoreLinkText="show more" LessLinkText="show fewer" />


Note:
Title: appear in the refinement panel
MetadataThreshhold : if your department column having metadata this is the minimum value to use when displaying the results
MappedProperty : This is the Field name you have used to create the managed metadata.
12.Checkin the page
13.Run a search...There you can find the refinement values you have just configured.

I'll update this post with more screens, while time permits

Happy coding,

Buddike