How to: Return all items in the Search Index in SharePoint 2013
Posted
Friday, October 11, 2013 11:24 AM
by
CoreyRoth
As an administrator or developer, there may be times when you really want to see everything in the search index. It’s great for troubleshooting. Unfortunately, the way you do this seems to vary between SharePoint versions. I wrote on this in the past about how to do this in SharePoint 2010 with FAST Search for SharePoint using the % operator, but that no longer works in SharePoint 2013.
What can we use instead? Now we can use the asterisk (*). Just type it into your search box and you will see everything in the index (that you have permission to view).
Scrolling to the bottom of the page, we will see an approximation of how many search results there are.
One thing to note is that this will return all items in the current result source. By default, that is Everything as you see highlighted below the search box. We can just as easily return all people by clicking on the people link.
It works for conversations and videos too.
Lastly, here is videos.
Isn’t the video results page nice?
It works for on-premises search results too. In SharePoint 2010, the percent syntax didn’t work on-premises, just in FS4SP and SharePoint Online.
Lastly, you can use this from REST as well. Just put the asterisk (*) in your querytext parameter like you see below.
http://server/_api/search/query?querytext=’*’
I’ve highlighted the row count in the search index.
This is a great trick to view what is in your search index. There are other ways of course but this one is pretty easy to get started with. Give it a try on your SharePoint site and see what is out there today.