Starting a Full Update of a Content Index

During a full update, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 updates the content index for all content. A full update adds new content, modifies changed content, and removes deleted content from the index. This is the most time-consuming and resource-intensive type of update. In a server farm configuration, SharePoint Portal Server automatically propagates one or more indexes from index management servers to search (destination) servers after creating or updating an index.

You should perform a full update in the following situations:

• Whenever you change the update rules specified for content sources. These update rules control what content is included in the index.
• When an area is renamed.
• When you have changed a noise word file. A noise word is a word such as "the" or "an" that is not useful in an index. For information about editing the noise word file, see Editing a Noise Word File.
• After you have reset the index. For more information, see Resetting a Content Index.
• When the system experiences a power failure. You should perform a full update after power is restored if you notice that documents are missing.

Whenever you perform a full update of the index, each user who selected the e-mail alert option receives an e-mail message listing all of his or her alerts.

If power to the server is interrupted during an update, the update continues after power is restored. The index is in the "initializing" state for a certain period of time, which depends on the size of the crawl. The crawl resumes after it finishes initializing. The index is available for queries during this time.

You can start a full update only if the update status is Idle. You can view the update status in the Update Status column for the index on the Configure Search and Indexing page. The update status can have the following values:

• Idle
• Crawling
• Crawling Adaptively
• Crawling Incrementally
• Paused (by user)
• Paused (disk full)
• Merging
• Propagating

Start a full update of a content index

1. On the Site Settings page, in the Manage Search Settings and Indexed Content section, click Configure search and indexing.
2. On the Configure Search and Indexing page, in the Content Indexes section, click Manage the list of indexes.
3. On the Manage Content Indexes page, rest the pointer on the index name, and then click the arrow that appears.
4. On the menu that appears, click Full Update.

You can schedule automatic updates of an index. For more information, see Creating a Search Schedule.