How to Manually Start a Full or Incremental Crawl in MOSS 2007

Crawling is the process in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 by which the system parses the content and its metadata to build a content index. The content index (a.k.a. index) is then used to serve search queries. In MOSS 2007 you can either perform a full or an incremental crawl. In most environments, an administrator will schedule the crawls so they take place automatically. However, in certain situations you may need to perform a manual crawl. For example, if you apply a crawl rule to the content you would want to run a manual crawl. Keep in mind that a full crawl is more taxing on the CPU and memory than an incremental crawl. Another thing to understand is that once you start a crawl, you may not want to stop it. In other words, it may be advisable to let the system finish the crawl or if you must, simply pause it.

WARNING: Consider the pros and cons of stopping versus pausing a crawl. When you stop a crawl of a content source, MOSS 2007 automatically performs a full crawl the next time you crawl that content source. This is true even in situations where you perform an incremental crawl and then stop it. For this reason, depending on your situation, it may be advisable to consider pausing the crawl rather than stopping it.

To start a full or incremental crawl manually, start SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration console.

1.  In the Quick Launch area, under Shared Services Administration, click on a shared service.

2. On the Shared Services Administration page click Search administration in the Search section.

3. On the Search Administration page, in the Quick Launch area, Click Content sources in the Crawling section.

You may not see Search administration listed in that section if you do not have the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers installed. In that case click Search settings in the Search section in step 2 and then perform step 3.

4. On the Configure Search Settings page, click Content sources and crawl schedules, which is the first link on that page in the Crawl Settings section.

5. On the Manage Content Sources page, move your mouse cursor over the content source that you want to crawl.

6. Click on the drop-down arrow next to the content source and then either click Start Full Crawl or click Start Incremental Crawl.

7. The status column will show you the status, e.g. Crawling Full, if you start a full crawl. The status doesn’t refresh automatically so you may have to refresh the screen a few times until the status changes to idle.