Continuous Crawls in SharePoint 2013

This article describes the new crawl type “Continuous Crawls” in SharePoint 2013.

Continuous Crawl in SharePoint 2013

In SharePoint 2010 there were two crawl types, “Full Crawl” and “Incremental Crawl”, whereas in SharePoint 2013 they have introduced a new crawl type named “Continuous Crawls” that keeps the content up to date. Continuous crawls are enabled only for the Content Sources that use the “SharePoint Sites” content source type. If a full crawl or incremental crawl is running then you will not be able to start a new crawl for the same content source until the old crawl is completed whereas multiple continuous crawls can run at the same time. All contents will be up to date because of continuous crawl.

Enable Continuous Crawls for the content source

1. Navigate to Central Administration.
2. Click on Manage service applications that is available under Application Management.
   
   
   
   
3. Click on Search Service Application.
   
   
   
   
4. Click on Content Sources that is available under Crawling section.
   
   
   
   
5. Click on the content source that is of type “SharePoint Sites”.
   
   
   
   
6. Under Crawl Schedules select “Enable Continuous Crawls” and then click on Ok.
   
   
   
   
7. The status will be changed to “Crawling Continuous” for the content source.
   
   
   
   
8. By default, a continuous crawl is scheduled for every 15 minutes and the SharePoint administrator can change this interval using the PowerShell.

Disable Continuous Crawl for the content source

1. Once a continuous crawl is started it cannot be stopped or paused, you will be able to just disable it.
2. Select the content source and then click on the down arrow.
3. Click on “Disable Continuous Crawl”.
   
   
   
   
4. A message will pop up, click on Ok.
   
   
   
   
5. Continuous crawls will be disabled and the incremental crawl will be enabled.

Summary

Thus in this article you saw the new crawl type “Continuous Crawls” in SharePoint 2013.