Starting a Full Update of a Content Source

During a full update, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 updates all content in the content source. A full update includes adding new content, modifying changed content, refreshing the content index for existing unchanged content, and removing deleted content from the content index. This is the most time-consuming and resource-intensive type of update.

You should perform a full update in the following situations:

• If you create a new rule that affects only one content source, you should perform a full update on that content source.
• If files are renamed in a specific content source, you should perform a full update on that content source.

Note  If you change settings to reduce the amount of content that is crawled (for example, you change rules that include or exclude content to limit the crawl, or you reduce the crawling depth for the content source), three full updates must occur before any previously-crawled pages are excluded from the index.

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 content source on the Manage Content Sources page.

Start a full update of a content source

1. On the Site Settings page, in the Search Settings and Indexed Content section, click Configure search and indexing.
2. On the Configure Search and Indexing page, in the Other Content Sources section, click Manage content sources.
3. On the Manage Content Sources page, rest the pointer on the name of the content source, and then click the arrow that appears.
4. On the menu that appears, click Start Full Update.

You can schedule automatic updates of a content source. For more information, see Specifying the Search Schedule for a Content Source.