Sharepoint 2013 Administration - Enable And Modify Continuous Crawl

SharePoint 2013 includes a new type of crawl by the name Continuous Crawl, which ensures the maximum possible refreshness of SharePoint Index.

Continuous Crawl possess the ability to run in parallel and does not expect any previous crawl to get completed before the current one launched.

Continuous Crawl is available only for SharePoint Index of type SharePoint sites.

Once started, a Continuous Crawl can be paused or stopped or disabled.

The default craw interval for Continuous Crawl is 15 minutes but this can be set to any appropriate value.

Since we don’t have any user interface in SharePoint 2013 to set this value, so we are left with only possibility i.e. by using PowerShell.

Enable Continuous Crawl: Central Administration

Go to Central Admin and click Manage Service Applications.
Click Search Service Application.

On Search Administration page, click Content Sources link on the left navigation.

Select SharePoint Index, which you want to enable with Continuous Crawl.

On SharePoint Index Settings page, scroll down to Crawl Schedule section, select Enable Continuous Crawls radio button and save the settings.

Enable Continuous Crawl: PowerShell

$serviceApp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
$contentSource = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlContentSource -SearchApplication $serviceApp -Identity “Local SharePoint sites”
Set-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlContentSource -Identity $contentSource -EnableContinuousCrawls $True

Modify default interval of Continuous Crawl: PowerShell

$serviceApp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
$serviceApp.SetProperty(“ContinuousCrawlInterval”, 5)
$serviceApp.Update()

Hope, you found it helpful.