SharePoint 2013 Search - 0 Relevant Results

Question

My Search Service Application seems to have conked out (returning 500 Server Errors) so I tried to create a new one. The new SSA has found plenty of items (around 16,000 as per screenshot), but when I try to run a search, I get no results - the ULS log (attached) indicates there are 0 relevant results coming back and it does seem to be querying the new SSA judging by the GUID.

I've tested with multiple keywords that should return some results such as "test", "health" and "news". I do note that one of my crawler components is having problems, I plan to address that next just in case.

Any suggestions?

![231834-2022-08-16-18-46-51-remote-desktop-connect-search.png][1]

[231852-uls-search.txt][1]

Answer 1

Thanks for the tips, yes I've done a full crawl. What I noticed today is the securitytokenservice is not working on the server that fails, I'm guessing this might be a bigger problem than I thought. The security token service app is giving 500 server errors in the event logs - System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error.

I'm considering creating a new topology that skips that server, but obviously I want to fix that server at some point too. Most of the ideas I've seen so far involve rebuilding UPS which is more invasive than I want to do. I did try resetting the application pool and I validated the files in the endpoint folder are unchanged for several years.

Here's the screenshot of the previous topology:

Answer 2

So I still need to figure out what's going on with the broken server (securitytokenservice and searchtopology apps returning 500 server errors), but dropping the server from the topology worked for now.

3 places the server errors were apparent:

1. The old search service that failed was showing the 500 error in place of the search service app settings.
2. The health monitor had a note about security token service
3. For more info I went to the server event logs for the affected server and found a bunch of different SharePoint foundation errors, most of which seem to be caused by 500 errors like this: