WSS–Search is not working, no results being returned

Problem:
Search is not working on your WSS 3.0 farm. Customer was receiving "No results were returned'. They had one web application and several site collections under it.

Environment Details:

  • WSS: build level: 12.0.0.6545
  • Windows 2003 OS – SP2 –x86
  • SQL Server Version: 2005 – SP3 – x86
  • Search is running on 2 different servers on 2 different search databases

Resolution:

  • This customer had a ton of data (almost 2 TB and thousands of site collections), so we changed the indexing schedule for the search service to run once daily, instead of every 10 minutes that they had set

  • Stopped the crawl on both servers with the following command:
    stsadm –o spsearch –action fullcrawlstop

  • Verify that the crawl stopped by looking at the msscrawlurl table, see that it is no longer being populated

  • We found the following error codes on already running crawls on different documents:
    Error 3 - "Some parts of this document cannot be accessed"

    Error 4 - "Content for this URL is excluded by the server because a no-index attribute

    Error 7 - "The file reached the maximum download limit. Check that the full text of the document can be meaningfully crawled.

  • Started another crawl by this command:
    stasadm –o spsearch –action fullcrawlstart

  • Looked at the msscrawlurl table to see that it was being populated, which means that the crawl is running

 

Fight Comparison:
This was Larry Holmes vs Ernie Shavers…I got beat up and knocked down a bit, but pulled through