SharePoint Online: Error loading page: Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator.

Question

Hi,

We have a web application written in C# that connects to SharePoint Online to retrieve a list of all the sub sites and populates the drop down in the UI. But this drop down stopped populating in all the environments suddenly and shows the following error -

Error loading page: Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator.

As part of troubleshooting, verified the permissions of the service accounts, re-indexed the site so that it will be picked up for next scheduled crawl by Microsoft, debugged it locally and found that it is able to retrieve the first 500 results fine but with a subsequent call to get another set of 500 records is where it bombs. Is there anything else that I would need to check? Please advise.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Regards
SLS

Answer 1

Hi @sravya shivapuram ,

Per my research and testing, except checking the permissions of the current service account, and reindex a site, The error may also be related to firewall rules, please follow these steps to create a rule and check if this error still exists:

Steps:

1. In the Windows Server Start menu, type Windows Firewall. (Or open Control Panel > System and Security > Windows Firewall.)
2. Select Advanced Settings in the left-hand pane, and then Inbound Rules.
3. In the Actions pane on the right, select New Rule.
4. In the New Rule wizard, select Port and then select Next.
5. Select the TCP check box, select the Specific local ports check box, enter 808, and then select Next.
6. Select Allow the connection and then select Next.
7. Select which profiles to apply the rule to. (The default is to have all three selected.)
8. Enter a rule name and select Finish.

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Answer 2

Hi @sravya shivapuram ,

I'm glad to hear you solve the problem ,if you have any issue about SharePoint, you are welcome to raise a ticket in this forum.

By the way, since the Microsoft Q&A community has a policy that "The question author cannot accept their own answer. They can only accept answers by others." and according to the scenario introduced here: Answering your own questions on Microsoft Q&A, I would make a brief summary of this thread:

[SharePoint Online: Error loading page: Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator.]

Issue Symptom:
We have a web application written in C# that connects to SharePoint Online to retrieve a list of all the sub sites and populates the drop down in the UI. But this drop down stopped populating in all the environments suddenly and shows the following error -

Error loading page: Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator.

As part of troubleshooting, verified the permissions of the service accounts, re-indexed the site so that it will be picked up for next scheduled crawl by Microsoft, debugged it locally and found that it is able to retrieve the first 500 results fine but with a subsequent call to get another set of 500 records is where it bombs. Is there anything else that I would need to check? Please advise.

Current status:
We have changed the way 'GetSearchResults' method is setup in our code and that seemed to have worked temporarily. The results are now being loaded.

You could click the "Accept Answer" button for this summary to close this thread, and this can make it easier for other community member's to see the useful information when reading this thread. Thanks for your understanding!

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If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".
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