Troubleshooting Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search using the logs.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS3)uses the same basic technology the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) uses. MOSS has a pretty good UI for determining the status of queries, configuration, etc. However, WSS3 does not provide much interface for anything when it comes to the search engine. In particular, I wanted to find out why a particular url was not being indexed.

I figured it must be somewhere in a database or log file. So, I looked in the log files (usually located at

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS

) and did see anything there. I looked in the Windows Event log and didn't find anything there. So, the only place left was the database. You should have a Search database (the database that has the word Search in it is usually the database you are looking for).

I found the MSSCRawlUrlLog table in the Search database. I found that it has a DisplayUrl column that will tell you what it tried to index. It has a column called ErrorDesc and an ErrorID column. I initially thought that the ErrorDesc was just description from the MSSCrawlErrorList (a look up table of all possible error ids), but it isn't. It is actually some other error description. Both error messages can be useful, however I find the one from the MSSCrawlErrorList table to be the most useful. Here is the query that takes all this into consideration.

select DisplayURl, l.ErrorDesc, el.ErrorMsg, LastTouchStart, HostID, StartAddressID from MSSCrawlUrlLog l
left outer join MSSCrawlErrorList el on (l.ErrorID = el.ErrorID)
order by DisplayURL, LastTouchStart

If you want to take know what the coHostID lumn maps to, just look at the MSSCrawlHostList table. It also has an overview of crawl status. Here is a very simple, but useful query that tells you for each host the Success, Error, and Warning counts.

select * from dbo.MSSCrawlHostList