Troubleshooting No Search Results

  • Updated

If search results do not appear in the Workarea or the site, use the following approaches troubleshoot the issue:

  • Check the query being sent to the search server.
  • Use a bare-bones ASPX search page.
  • Create a SharePoint Search site directly on the Search Server to test if search is crawling and indexing your site.
  • Query the Solr index directly. 

Checking the actual query

You can view the query being sent to the search provider by changing the LogLevel key in the site's web.config to a value of 3. For example, name="LogLevel" value="3".

After you save the change, perform a search, then open the Event Viewer and go to Windows Logs > Application . 

Using a bare-bones search page

Extract one or more of the following search page samples into your website folder then browse to the page.

Creating a SharePoint Search Server Basic Search Center Page

For sites using the Search Server search provider, create a SharePoint site to deliver basic search results directly from the search index with the following steps.

  1. On the search server, click Start > All Programs > Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products > SharePoint 2010 Central Administration .
  2. Open the Site Actions drop-down menu and select New Site .
  3. Select the Basic Search Center site. (Some versions may require that you select Enterprise and then search).
  4. Enter a Title and URL name for the search site. For example, TestSearch .
  5. Click Create .
  6. After the new site page appears, enter a search string and click Search .
    NOTE: By default the entire index is searched. If you want to limit the results to a particular site, you must specify a Scope value, located in the Application Event log.

Query the Solr Index

For sites using the Solr search provider, access the builtin Solr search page using the following steps.

  1. Open a browser and go to the Apache Solr page, for example http://Solr host name:7602/solr/#/
  2. Open the Core Selector drop-down menu and select the desired core (site).
  3. Click Query .
  4. Enter the keyword in the q block and any filters in the fq block, then click Execute Query .