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Sriram BalaSharePoint Practice

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 -

Creating and Configuring Search Service ApplicationVerified Against Build #15.0.4128.1014

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Creating and Configuring Search Service Application

How to create and configure a SharePoint Search service applicationWhen you deploy and configure a Search service application, you perform the following main tasks:

1. Create accounts — Certain domain user accounts are required specifically for a Search service application.

2. Create a Search service application — A Search service application provides enterprise search features and functionality.

3. Configure the Search service application — Basic configuration of a Search service application includes configuring a default content access account, an email contact, and content sources.

4. Configure the Search service application topology — You can deploy search components on different servers in the farm. You can also specify which instance of SQL Server is used to host the search-related databases.

Step 1: Create accounts that are required for a SharePoint Search service applicationThe following table lists the accounts that are required when a Search service application is created.Account Description Notes

Search service

Windows user credentials for the SharePoint Server Search service, which is a Windows service

This setting applies to all Search service applications in the farm. You can change this account at any time by clicking Configure service accounts in the Security section on the Central Administration home page.

Search Admin Web Service application pool

Search Query and Site Settings Web Service application pool

Windows user credentials

For each of these accounts, you can use the same credentials that you specified for the Search service. Or, you can assign different credentials to each account according to the principle of least-privilege administration.

Default content access Windows user We recommend that you specify a separate

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credentials for the Search service application to use to access content when crawling

account for the default content access account according to the principle of least-privilege administration.

The accounts that you use for the Search service, the Search Admin Web Service application pool, and the Search Query and Site Settings Web Service application pool must be registered as managed accounts in SharePoint Server 2013 so that they are available when you create the Search service application. Use the following procedure to register each of these accounts as a managed account.To register a managed account

1. On the Central Administration home page, in the Quick Launch, click Security.2. On the Security page, in the General Security section, click Configure managed

accounts.3. On the Managed Accounts page, click Register Managed Account.4. On the Register Managed Account page, in the Account Registration section, type the

user name and password that you want to use as credentials for the service account.5. If you want SharePoint Server 2013 to manage password changes for this account, select

the Enable automatic password change check box and configure the parameters for automatic password change.

6. Click OK.Step 2: Create a SharePoint Search service applicationEach Search service application has a separate content index. You can create multiple Search service applications if you want to have different content indexes for different sets of content. For example, if you want to segregate sensitive content (such as employee benefits information) into a separate content index, you can create a separate Search service application to correspond to that set of content.Note:

Each Search service application has its own search topology. If you create more than one Search service application in a farm, we recommend that you allocate dedicated servers for the search topology of each Search service application. Deploying several Search service applications to the same servers will significantly increase the resource requirements (CPU and memory) on those servers.Use the following procedure to create a Search service application.

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To create a Search service application 1. Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is a member of the Farm

Administrators group for the farm for which you want to create the service application.2. On the Central Administration home page, in the Application Management section, click

Manage service applications.3. On the Manage Service Applications page, on the ribbon, click New, and then click Search

Service Application.4. On the Create New Search Service Application page, do the following:

1. Accept the default value for Service Application name, or type a new name for the Search service application.

2. In the Search Service Account list, select the managed account that you registered in the previous procedure to run the Search service.

3. In the Application Pool for Search Admin Web Service section, do the following:1. Select the Create new application pool option, and then specify a name for

the application pool in the Application pool name text box.2. In the Select a security account for this application pool section, select

the Configurable option, and then from the list select the account that you registered to run the application pool for the Search Admin Web Service.

4. In the Application Pool for Search Query and Site Settings Web Service section, do the following:

1. Choose the Create new application pool option, and then specify a name for the application pool in the Application pool name text box.

2. In the Select a security account for this application pool section, select the Configurable option, and then from the list select the account that you registered to run the application pool for the Search Query and Site Settings Web Service.

5. Click OK.Step 3: Configure the SharePoint Search service applicationYou configure a Search service application on the Search Administration page for that service application. Use the following procedure to go to the Search Administration page for a particular Search service application.To go to the Search Administration page

1. Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is an administrator for the Search service application that you want to configure.

2. On the home page of the Central Administration website, in the Application Management section, click Manage service applications.

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3. On the Manage Service Applications page, click the Search service application that you want to configure.

On the Search Administration page, configure the settings as described in the following sections: Specify the default content access account Specify the contact email address Create content sources

Specify the default content access accountWhen you create a Search service application, the account that you specify for the Search service is automatically configured as the default content access account. The crawler uses this account to crawl content that does not have an associated crawl rule that specifies a different account. For the default content access account, we recommend that you specify a domain user account that has read access to as much of the content that you want to crawl as possible. You can change the default content access account at any time. If you have to crawl certain content by using a different account, you can create a crawl rule and specify a different account for crawling. For information about how to create a crawl rule, see Manage crawl rules in SharePoint Server 2013.Use the following procedure to specify the default content access account.To specify the default content access account

1. On the Search Administration page, in the System Status section, click the link in the Default content access account row.

2. In the Default Content Access Account dialog box, in the Account box, type the account that you created for content access in the form domain\user name.

3. Type the password for this account in the Password and Confirm Password boxes.4. Click OK.

Specify the contact email addressThe Search service writes the contact email address to the logs of crawled servers. The default contact email address, someone@example.com, is a placeholder. We recommend that you change this to an account that an external administrator can contact when a crawl might be contributing to a problem such as a decrease in performance on a server that the search system is crawling.Use the following procedure to specify the contact email address.To specify the contact email address

1. On the Search Administration page, in the System Status section, click the link for the Contact e-mail address.

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2. In the Search E-mail Setting dialog box, in the E-mail Address box, type the email address that you want to appear in the logs of servers that are crawled by the search system.

3. Click OK.

Create content sources in a SharePoint Search service applicationIn order for users to be able to get search results, the search system must first crawl the corresponding content. Crawling requires at least one content source. A content source is a set of options that you use to specify the type of content to crawl, the starting URLs to crawl, and when and how deep to crawl. When a Search service application is created, a content source named "Local SharePoint sites" is automatically created and configured for crawling all SharePoint sites in the local server farm, and for crawling user profiles. You can create content sources to specify other content to crawl and how the system will crawl that contentIf you choose the Standalone installation option when you install SharePoint Server 2013, a full crawl of all SharePoint sites in the farm is automatically performed after installation and an incremental crawl is scheduled to occur every 20 minutes after that. If you choose the Server Farm installation option when you install SharePoint Server 2013, no crawls are automatically scheduled or performed. In the latter case, you must either start crawls manually or schedule times for crawls to be performed. For more information, see the following articles;

Start, pause, resume, or stop a crawl in SharePoint Server 2013 Best practices for crawling in SharePoint Server 2013

Step 4: Configure the SharePoint Search service application topologyWhen you create a Search service application, the SharePoint Server Search service is started on the application server that is hosting the Central Administration website, and search components are deployed to that server. If you have more than one application server in your farm, you can deploy additional search components on other application servers, depending on your requirements. You can deploy multiple instances of certain components. For more information, see the following articles:

Manage the search topology in SharePoint Server 2013 Plan enterprise search architecture in SharePoint Server 2013

Create a Search Center siteA Search Center site, or Search Center, provides an interface for users to submit search queries and view search results. A Search Center site is the top-level site of a site collection that a farm

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administrator creates by using the Enterprise Search Center template or Basic Search Center template.

To create a SharePoint Search Center site 1. Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is a member of the Farm

Administrators group.2. On the home page of the Central Administration website, in the Application Management

section, click Create site collections.3. On the Create Site Collection page, do the following:

1. In the Web Application section, select a web application to contain the new site collection. To use a web application other than the one that is displayed, click the web application that is displayed, and then click Change Web Application.

2. In the Title and Description section, in the Title box, type the name for the new Search Center site. Optionally, type a description in the Description box.

3. In the Web Site Address section, for the part of the URL immediately after the web application address, select /sites/, or select a managed path that was previously defined, and then type the final part of the URL.Note the address of the new Search Center for future reference.

4. In the Template Selection section, do the following:1. In the Select the experience version drop-down list, select 2013 to create

a Search Center site that provides the SharePoint Server 2013 user experience, or select 2010 to create a Search Center site that provides the SharePoint 2010 Products user experience.For more information, see Search user interface improvements in What's new in search in SharePoint Server 2013.

2. In the Select a template subsection, click the Enterprise tab, and then do one of the following:

If you are using SharePoint Foundation 2013, select the Basic Search Center template.

Otherwise, if you are using SharePoint Server 2013, select the Enterprise Search Center template.

5. In the Primary Site Collection Administrator section, in the User name box, type the user name of the primary site collection administrator for this site collection in the form domain\user name.

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6. (Optional) In the Secondary Site Collection Administrator section, type the user name of a secondary site collection administrator in the form domain\user name.

7. In the Quota Template section, select No Quota.A Search Center site is not intended to be a data repository. Therefore, you do not have to select a quota template.

8. Click OK.4. On the Top-Level Site Successfully Created page, click the link to the Search Center site that

you created.After you create the Search Center site, you must grant site access to users so that they can perform search queries and view search results. Use the following procedure to grant site access to users.

To grant access to the SharePoint Search Center 1. Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is a member of the Owners

group on the Search Center site.2. In a web browser, go to the Search Center site.3. Open the Site menu by clicking the gear icon in the upper-right portion of the page, and

then click Shared with.4. In the Shared With dialog box, click Invite people.5. In the Share <SearchCenterName> dialog box, in the Enter users separated with

semicolons text box, type the names of the Windows user groups and Windows users to whom you want to grant permissions for submitting queries and viewing search results in the Search Center.For example, to grant access to the Search Center to all Windows users, type NT Authority\authenticated users.

6. Click Show options.7. Clear the Send an email invitation check box.8. In the Select a group or permission level drop-down list, select <SearchCenterName>

Visitors [Read].9. Click Share.

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

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In this post you will learn how to configure enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013 to provide excellent new search features available in the latest version of SharePoint in your SharePoint site.

You have to perform below steps to configure search in SharePoint 2013.

Create manage accounts required for search Create search service application. Configure Search service application. Create Content Source - In this we will see

what is Continuous crawling. Create Search center. New Improvements in Search.

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.

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Click on Configure Managed accounts under general security. It will open below Figure : Registered Managed Account. Please 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.

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Figure: Registered Managed Account

Create search service applicationClick on "Manage Service Applications" under Application Management from central administration.Click on search service application from new service application list.

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Figure: Create Search service application.Scroll down a little bit from the "Create New Search Service Application" popup screen, then Select the create a new application pool and enter the application pool name as "SP-Search Admin Web Service"and select the account as "spsearch". Please see the below Figure.

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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 "spsearch".

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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 the show the below screen as the final status of completion of creating the search service application. Please see the below Figure.

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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.

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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 also included in the search. As I said before there are lots of changes in Search in 2013, we will cover each one of them.

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Create Content Source:We have created search service application successfully. Now its time to create content source to get the desired content show 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 sources, but in the real world we will create individual content source for each web application. So lets create a content source. To create it click on "New Content Source" from the Figure:Content Sources.Enter the details shown in the below figures forName: SharePoint-Journey

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Select the type of content to be crawled: SharePoint sitesType Start address below : http://sharepoint-journey.com

Leave the remaining setting by default shown in the below Figure.

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Crawl schedules:Leave Enable Continuous Crawl. Create Incremental Crawl and Full Crawl based on your requirement.Please see the below Figures: Full Crawl schedule and Incremental Crawl schedules.

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Figure: Full Crawl schedule-Once in a week i.e. on Saturday at 12:00 AM.

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Figure: Incremental Crawl schedule -For every 5 hours.After configuring both schedules click ok. New content source "SharePoint-Journey" will get added to a list of content sources. For first time if you add a content source by default Full crawl it get initiate automatically.

Enable Continuous Crawls: One of new features that got 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 to complete to see the contents in search, but now it's no more an issue. Once the contents get 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 itself says that you don't require the incremental crawl because it has been set to "Enable Continuous Crawl".But to enable it you should have enough Infrastructure in place so that performance will get affected.

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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.

Figure: Disable Continuous Crawl.Now we have created content source and have seen what is the purpose of Continuous crawl.The next step is creating the search center where users will search the content that is required for them.

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Create search centerBasic search centerTo create the basic search center go to create site collections from the central administration screen under Application management. Please check the Create site collection post for more information on how to create a site collection in SharePoint 2013.

Figure: Basic Search CenterWhile creating the site collection Please select "Basic Search Center" from the Enterprise .Click ok. It will create a Basic search center.

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

Figure: Enterprise Search Center

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Scaling Search service applicationsScaling Search can very easily be done in a similar fashion as how Search service applications are partitioned across application (app) servers in your SharePoint farm. Any farm server that is running the Search service application can host any of these six roles.

●Administration●Crawler●Content Processing●Analytics Processing●Query Processing●Index

Crawl rulesCrawl rules give you the means to specify paths that should be included or excluded from being crawled. When the crawl rule is used to include content, it can have a specific authentication mechanism to gain read access to the content. An example is when a website uses a forms-based authentication and you must pass a user name and password to the site to get an authentication cookie, or if the website uses certificate authentication to validate that the client can access the content. Although these alternate methods are supported, their configuration is difficult at best and is not well documented.

Server name mappingsServer name mappings are used to override how URLs are shown in search results. They are typically needed when the URLs used by the crawler to access content are different than the URLs that users use to navigate to the same files. You can also use server name mappings to hide where the content really comes from or make a friendlier URL.To create a new server mapping, perform the following procedure:1.Open SharePoint Central Administration.2.Click Manage Service Applications.3.Click your Search Service application.4.On the Quick Launch bar, under Crawling, click Server Name Mappings.5.On the Server Name Mappings page, click New Mapping.6.In the Address In Index text box, type the address that shows in the search results that you want to replace.

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7.In the Address In Search Results text box, type the address with which you would like the first address to be replaced, and then click OK.

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File typesNot every type of content is indexed when crawled. For it to be picked up by the crawler and then subsequently indexed, it must be included as an allowed file type in the Search service application’s configuration. A file’s contents will also not be indexed unless it has a format handler or an IFilter installed; however, its basic properties such as title will be. If you have more than one crawl server, any custom IFilters must be installed on each of the servers where the content will be processed. For simplicity and support of future architectural changes, you might adopt a practice of installing them on all the servers in the farm. However, this can prove expensive depending on the licensing of the IFilter. After a format handler has been installed in SharePoint’s core, IFilters are not called. Another important point is that you cannot add new format handlers to the RTM version of SharePoint 2013. This might change in the future.Several file types and format handlers are included automatically during initial installation. In SharePoint 2013, the list includes several that were not present in SharePoint 2010 because of the merger with FAST Search. When you plan for content sources in your initial deployment, determine whether content that you want to crawl uses file types that are not included.

At any time, you can run the following Windows PowerShell commands to get the list of supported file types in your Farm:Get-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormat -SearchApplication $searchApp | select ExtensionTo add a new file type, perform the following procedure:1.Open SharePoint Central Administration.2.Click Manage Service Applications.3.Click your Search service application.4.On the Quick Launch bar, under Crawling, click File Types.5.On the File Types page, click New File Type.6.In the File Extension text box, type the file extension (without the period), and then click OK.After adding the file type, if there is no format handler or IFilter, the only thing that will be indexed is the name of the file and its basic properties, such as the modify date, the create date, who modified or created the file, and any protocol handler properties found by the crawler. To get the content of the file, you must install a new IFilter or wait for Microsoft to implement a format handler.

Crawler impact rules

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Crawler impact rules can be used to adjust the load that the crawler applies to content sources. Request frequencies apply per Crawler component. When adding a rule, you specify the path of the target content source address URI and the request frequency. The request frequency can be based on a batch size with no wait between, or you can grab one document at a time with a wait between each fetch. Crawler impact rules are more commonly used when the target system cannot handle the load that the SharePoint crawl components would otherwise put on it by default. By spacing out the requests, the target system should be able to handle the load without affecting any other users or applications that use the target.To add a new crawler impact rule, perform the following procedure:1.Open SharePoint Central Administration.2.Click Manage Service Applications.3.Click your Search service application.4.On the Quick Launch bar, under Crawling, click Crawler Impact Rules.5.On the Crawler Impact Rules page, click Add Rule.6.In the Site text box, type the address that you want to throttle.7.In the Request Frequency section, click the option to select either to throttle the requests or to request a single document at a time as the request frequency.8. If you select to wait between request, In the Time To Wait text box, type a value for the wait time between requests in seconds, and then click OK.

Search result removalThere might come a time when results that are displayed must be removed immediately. There could be any number of reasons why you want to do this, including the following:● Offensive content● Sensitive content● Inaccurate content

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For cases such as these, SharePoint 2013 does provide a means to remove unwanted items from your search results. You can add new paths to remove results by running the following commands:$crawlLog = new-object Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.CrawlLog($searchApp)$crawlLog.RemoveDocumentFromSearchResults(“http://www.contoso.com”)To add new paths via Central Administration, perform the following procedure:1. Open SharePoint Central Administration.2. Click Manage Service Applications.3. Click your Search service application.4. On the Quick Launch bar, under Queries And Results, click Search Result Removal.5. On the Search Result Removal page, in the URLs to remove text area, type the URLs that you would like to remove.6. Click Remove Now.

New improvements in search results page:You have everything ready for search , start searching. Open the Enterprise Search center site collection.New Improvements in Search results page are:See the below Figure where you have different options to search like.

Everything People Conversations Videos Reports

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Below one is a basic search site, these options will be available in enterprise search as well. You can observe that under Result Type:1 you can search based on document type like PDF, web page, word etc.Next one is based on Author:2 who created the document. Third one is based on Modified date 3: where you can change the search results based on date can be changed using slider.The options for slider are one year ago, one month ago, 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

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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 stored.

No more PDF IfiltersYou don't need to install the PDF Ifilter and make a lot of settings to search PDF documents in SharePoint 2013.That will take care by SharePoint 2013 now, Please see above Figure, where i have uploaded a PDF document and it displayed for users without doing any configuration or settings.

ConclusionWe have created the Search service application, created the accounts required to create it and we have seen how search administration page looks and what are the new changes in Search topologies. Then we created the Content source, while creating it we have seen new option called

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"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.