Add Site and Page Description to SharePoint Search Index

Question

As part of a SharePoint solution, the functionality for users to create new web sites and publishing pages (programmatically) via a button click has been added. I need to ensure that the Description field for the newly created sites and pages is indexed by SharePoint Search. What is the best way to do this?

Please note, I am NOT interested in starting a new crawl. I just want to ensure that whenever the next scheduled crawl occurs, the contents of these fields will be searchable.

Thanks, MagicAndi

Answer 1

I'm guessing you mean how can you ensure the site is indexed immediately?

Generally, crawls are scheduled which means your new site will only be added to the search index after the next crawl is done. So if your incremental crawl happens every hour you may have to wait up to an hour for it to appear in the search index.

However, given that your new sites are being added programatically you could also programatically start an incremental crawl if it is vital for it to start appearing in search results immediately. There are details how to do this in this article.

Update:

The site title and description should be indexed automatically by the next crawl. If this isn't happening, then you don't have a Content Source that covers that site so you need to create/update one to cover the new sites and make sure it has a crawl schedule. If the new sites are created in separate site collections consider putting them on a Managed Path.

In our SharePoint system we have a terrabyte of data with 100,000 site collections and probably 20 new site collections added every day. We only have one content source that points to the root of the site and everything gets indexed automatically.

It sounds like you're missing a content source or a crawl schedule.

Answer 2

It turns out that the site description is included in the crawl by default. I tested the search default properties by creating a new site and assigning a unique text string to the description. After the next incremental crawl, I was able to search and find the unique string via the default SharePoint search.

I have not yet tested if the page description is included in the search scope by default, but I'm prepared to guess that it is. I will update my answer as soon as I get a chance to test this.