Sometimes for a multitude of reasons search topologies will fail. This can be from anything from a cumulative update that failed, to a psconfig.exe execution that stopped or failed. Also databases can get corrupted such as the search crawl database and the link store. There are several topologies for search you can build to get an excellent crawler with awesome support with office web apps that allow preview viewers. One of the fastest crawler topologies I have built looks like this…
With the four server medium farm (2 WFEs and 2 Apps), this will crawl 200 GB of raw SharePoint content in 11 minutes. At some point in time during cumulative updates the crawler quit functioning and mssdaemon would not fire correctly. It would not return any crawl results. After spending weeks trying to get a resolution while working with Microsoft support, we decided to rebuild the Enterprise Search Topology. This is the process we went through…
- Removing Search Topology (Removing Existing SSA) – PowerShell script
- Create Search Service Topology (With Single Partition) – PowerShell script (larger)
- Crawl data from Web applications
- This you should be able to do on your own in Central Administration