Tuesday, October 10, 2017

SharePoint Online Search not returning all results

When building the data source for our SPFx list aggregator web part, we noticed that in some cases when we make a request to the SharePoint Online Rest Search API, some lists or content were not returned by the search.

I cannot confirm exactly what happens or why, but in some cases lists that had their title changed were not picked up by the search service days and weeks after the change.
In other cases, lists that were created a few months ago were not returned at all unless specifically mentioning their list name in the query.

After investigating this for a long time, we could not identify a specific common cause for all these lists that would cause this to happen. We did however find many people experiencing the same issue with the SharePoint Online search.

One workaround we found that would fix the issue within reasonable time (usually within a few minutes up to a couple of hours) was simply to visit those lists, go to the list settings and under advanced settings to click the "Reindex List" button.

This seem to fix the issue, which makes me thing that the problem is with the incremental search crawl logic not picking up all changes properly.



Hope that helps you guys.

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