Search engine errors

The Search Engine Errors report proactively warns Librarians and System Administrators about documents that are not capable of being indexed, search criteria errors, and index access errors. The Full Text Search report is emailed nightly according to the configuration settings defined for sending error emails. See Search Engine Configuration on how to set the users that will receive the emails and which errors will be emailed.

Not all alerts are cause for action. These alert emails can include the following types:

  • Files that are not capable of being indexed for a variety of reasons including encryption, macro security, and digital rights management.

    • For example, a PDF file can be encrypted so that the text inside the document is locked and cannot be searched. Another example is a Microsoft Excel worksheet that is protected with a password or macro level security. In this case, the search engine would also be blocked from indexing the contents of the file. Note that metadata and title searches still work on encrypted files.

  • When a user searches for a word or phrase that is indexed in a high proportion of the documents in the library. The following example error comes from a financial services company with over 250 000 documents.

    • Search Job error(s): / $E 0137 Too many words retrieved in index E:\FileHoldData\FullTextSearch\DTSIndex a*:2: 65530; financial: 6

    • In this case - a user was searching for "a* financial* - which meant that virtually every document in the 250,000 document repository because the word financial was in almost every document (they are an investment company) and a* is using the world card - so that meant that any letter "a" near the word financial is a candidate.

    • A user trying to search using a single character with a wildcard would be given the message/warning "The full text search query has invalid syntax" in addition to this error being logged on the server.

  • There are also errors that log that at a specific point in time, that something in the FileHoldData repository could not be accessed by the FH_Service account.

    • The DTSearch\FTS folder that contains the Full Text Search (FTS) index files cannot be accessed by the Service account that runs FileHold. Sometimes this is stored locally on the FileHold Web Server, and sometimes it is stored on a NAS or SAN. Permissions can change or there may be a network issue. You need to work with your IT department to make sure the Service account that runs FileHold has full control over this directory structure. You can quickly check what Service account name is by going to the FileHold server and examining which account runs the FTS Update Index scheduled task, or other FileHold tasks. You can also check the SQL Server's security logins to confirm this, or the FH App Pool's account in the IIS administration console.

  • Missing full text search files. Antivirus and security systems, rarely, will sometimes remove index files. This happens rarely, but is the prime culprit. These files are heavily used by system and FileHold processes, and some Antivirus software can view heavy file activities as being suspicious and take action.

To manage search engine errors

  1. In Web Client, go to Administration Panel > System Management > Full Text Search > Errors.
  2. To hide known errors, click Hide / Hide All.
  3. To show all errors, click Show / Show All.
  4. To create a report of all errors, click Create CSV. Save the file and open in Microsoft Excel to modify the report or send to [email protected] for analysis.