SharePoint Online - Re-indexing Site, Library or List

Question

Hi MS Q&A,

Seeking advice and information when manually attempting to perform Re-Index for a Site, Library or List, will the process take place immediately or within the next crawl schedule.
If against the next crawl schedule, what is the schedule frequency (e.g. 5min, 15mins etc...)

During the process when the contents are being Re-Indexed, confirming that existing Search Results are only refreshed but not purged before the index is rebuilt.
For example, it is not the same experience as with On-Premise SharePoint Search when Search Index is fully reset and search results will return no results until index are built up.

Example:
Before Re-Indexing against a Site, Library or List, keyword search attempt will return X number of results for related content within the Site, Library or List.
After initiating Re-Indexing, search results will be refreshed gradually to show updated search results as Re-Indexing activities are progressing.
It will not return 0 results while Re-Indexing activities are initiated and then slowly return more results as Re-Indexing activities are progressing.

Objective:
Attempting to confirm the impacts to Search service when the affected Site, Library or List is being triggered for Re-Indexing, such as if search results will not be available until Re-Indexing activities are completed or progressed to a point that relates to the Search Keyword being attempted.

Reference Article:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/crawl-site-content

Appreciate any advice or information.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi @Daniel Chee ,

As per my knowledge, all of the content in that library/list/site is picked up during the next scheduled crawl and re-indexed after requesting a re-indexing of a library/list/site. From my experience and support cases around Search related issues only non-official and rather vague statements like "Microsoft strives to meet the goal of 95% of changes indexed within 1 hour" are being provided. To clarify this, you can new a service request in Microsoft 365 to contact Microsoft 365 to help you check from the backend. Indeed, the search re-indexing experience between sharepoint online and SharePoint on-prem is different.

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