SharePoint search not indexing contents of document libraries [closed]

Question

I have a strange problem where the MS Word documents my documemt libraries are not being indexed. When I look at the crawl log I can see that the crawl is indexing the libraries themselves but not any of the documents within them.

I have checked the following setting and it is set to Yes:

Library settings >>>
 General Settings >>>
  Advanced Settings >>>
   Allow items from this document library to appear in search results?

I have also added the Default content access account to the members group of the site (as I want to also index drafts). The documents not being indexed are a mixture of checked in and drafts.

It might be useful to know that the sites containing the document libraries use the Team Site template, the site collection has publishing turned on. Everything was created programatically.

I'm pulling my hair out with this so any suggestions of what I can check or how I can approach this issue would be greatly appreciated - I have only been working with SharePoint for 2 months so I'm still learning.

TIA

Answer 1

check that the folder item is approved and published.

The effected libraries had the option Library Settings > Versioning Settings > Draft item security set to 'Only users who can edit items'.

My crawl account did have full control of the documents in the library and I logged in using the crawl account to confirm this.

When i changed the above option to 'Any user who can read items' then reset the index and did a full crawl, the documents where indexed and are now being served up by search.

I had previously read that the crawler ignores this option but it seems that it interprates it in an unexpected way.

Interestingly (and frustratingly) when i changed the 'Draft Item Security' option to 'Any user who can read items' and did an incremental craw

Answer 2

Ensure that the service account that is setup on the Search Service Application (under "Applcation Management" > "manage service applications" in Central Admin) has the correct permissions to view the documents. Also ensure that this account is not too highly privileged to ensure private documents are not displayed in the search results. I would recommend setting up a service account called “spsearch”, which has read access granted to the content sources.