SharePoint 2010 Search - Zero results for searching text inside documents.

Question

Hi everyone,

For some reason if you search for some text that is contained within a document here you will get no results, however if you search for the file name of the document you get results.

As far as I am aware, the full text indexing of word documents should be something that is out of the box behavior.

I have access to a test environment here that has the same behavior as their production environment, I have checked out several things (crawl logs, event viewer).  Nothing is jumping out at me as a problem though.

Anyone have any ideas as to what I can check out?

Answer 1

Hi,

What version of SharePoint are you using (Foundation, Standard, Enterprise, FAST) and what type of documents are you searching on?

-Ivan

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Ivan Sanders My LinkedIn Profile, My Blog, @iasanders.

Answer 2

Hi Ivan-

It was FAST and the documents in question were any that contain text (word, powerpoint, pdf).  We actually found the issue, for some reason the 'contents' managed property wasn't set to be included in the index.  I have no idea why it was configured that way (or if that is how FAST works out of the box).  I have it set to be included in the index and after the next full crawl we shall see if users can search for text inside of the documents.

Thanks!

Answer 3

Have you given the Nt Authority group as READ permission st search page?

Answer 4

That does have permisisons - 

I am really at a loss here.  I downloaded the 180-day FAST Trial and was able to search for a sentence that was inside a document and have it appear in the search results without having to do anything special.  This makes me think that the client may have configured FAST incorrectly.

Where should I be looking -

• Fast Content SSA - is this where the content is crawled and indexed?
• Fast Query SSA - from what I gather this is specific to people search?
• Search Service Application - this is the OOTB search from SP, not FAST, I don't believe they are using it.

What crawled property contains the text of a crawled word document?

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 5

Hi,

The full-text index will typically contain a set of managed properties that represents the content of the item that you are querying. This includes the body of the item, the title, the URL, and so on. The default full-text index is named content. I noticed you used the plural above "contents"

Also, if the contents of the document are not being crawled then it could be the ifilters. However, if the documents are showing up when you run Get-FASTSearchContentCollection -name "YourSiteCollectionName" but not in the search results page I have seen unusual results when the Search Service Account has been added to the local administrators group, if this is the case remove from the local administrators group and re-index.

I am by no means an expert on FAST and I am extremely happy with the SharePoint 2013 improvements in search where we have the FAST Features built into the SharePoint Search but don't have to deal with FAST. That aside for the moment, configuring a SharePoint farm to use FAST requires the creation of two FAST search service applications. The first is the content "Fast Content SSA" or crawling application and the second is the query application "Fast Query SSA". The content application is responsible for crawling content and passing it to the FAST server to be indexed. The query application passes queries along to FAST and then returns the results to the UI layer for display. However, people search is configured using the "Fast Query SSA"

There are a couple of tools on Codeplex if you lookup SharePoint search I have used the following http://spplayground.codeplex.com/

-Ivan

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Ivan Sanders My LinkedIn Profile, My Blog, @iasanders.

Answer 6

Thanks Ivan,

I was thinking it might have been iFilter related as well, but they have the MS Filter Pack 2.0 installed in the farm which seems to fix a lot of the issues related to older word documents - if that was indeed the problem here.

I am really scratching my head with this one, I am thinking that it might be easier to delete and recreate the SSA's for the farm.  Although I would like to know _why_ this happened in the first place since I can't seem to recreate it in other environments.

I have used this FASTSearchTool - http://fastforsharepoint.codeplex.com/

If I query with regular SharePoint search then I can get results back when searching for a phrase inside a document.  No results come back when using the FAST search though, so it's definitely something with FAST.

I think I am going to recommend that we delete and recreate the SSA's.

Answer 7

Hi,

As much as I hate to agree with you about rebuilding and environment to resolve an issue with FAST I find its much easier and better for the client. if I rebuild an environment like (FAST and UPS) provide the proper documentation in the form of build guidance, mostly everything I do now is scripted via PowerShell so I don't inadvertently click an incorrect button or accidentally misspell something. Regardless, if there isn't any documentation left behind then you can pretty well be certain that whoever built it probably hadn't built the environment very many times..

The net result; SharePoint may be up and stable, but if Search isn't working the client is missing one of the best experiences SharePoint has to offer, the more quickly you bring the environment to a known working state the belter you and the client will both be.

I knew there was another tool I had used for FAST on Codeplex and I couldn't remember the URL. Thank you for adding it to the post...

Cheers,

Ivan

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Ivan Sanders My LinkedIn Profile, My Blog, @iasanders.

Answer 8

Greetings all,

I have solved this mystery.

The %FASTSearch% root folder didn't have the FASTSearchAdministrators group members added to that folder.  I don't know how that was missed in the initial install but once that was added and a full crawl ran, documents are now searchable.

Perhaps this may help another person down the road.

Cheers!