Force a Full Crawl for a Site

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Hey all,

So I was doing some work with a customer and I was asked how to do a Full Crawl for a site, without actually doing a Full Crawl and only doing Incremental Crawl. So bascially, they would like to crawl a site fully, using only Incremental crawls. So I was told a quick thing that worked for me in my test. I am not saying that this is the right way, or the recommended way, or the best way to do this, but it is a cool thing that worked for me, so take it with a grain of salt :-)

  1. Go into the site's Site Settings, click the option for Search Visibility to NO, so the site is not available to be searched by MOSS.
  2. Now perform an Incremental Crawl. This site's content will no longer be available in search results.
  3. Now go back into the site and change the setting above to YES.
  4. Now perform an Incremental Crawl again. This Incremental Crawl will now act as the Full Crawl on the site :-)

This is helpful in situations where you can not wait for a Full Crawl but can do few Incremental Crawls during this time. This will do a Full Crawl on the site, even though you are doing an Incremental Crawl. Pretty cool :-)

Give it a try and let me know if it works for you.

Cheers
Mike