Reindexing SharePoint Content Manually – and an Indication of Improvements on the Horizon

If you’ve been using SharePoint for a while, you know that newly added content may not show up in search results immediately. These days, you my most directly notice this with News Posts in roll up News Web Parts or simply using the Microsoft Search box at the top of every page.

Microsoft 365 had gotten very good at “noticing” content changes, and until the last six months or so, you could expect that newly added content or content with newly set metadata columns would show up in search within a few minutes. Unfortunately, that performance level (which was never reflected in an actual Service Level Agreement (SLA) from Microsoft) is seemingly a thing of the past.

These days, I find myself manually triggering a reindex either at the Document Library or site level quite often. It’s the only way we can try to get things into the index on Microsoft 365; there’s no “full crawl” like we used to have in the on-premises days. Sadly, even these manually triggered reindexes aren’t a reliable way to solve the lags, though they give us something to do while we wait, at least.

One heartening development is that the manual reindexing tools have started to ask why you are choosing to reindex the container you’ve chosen. This can only mean that Microsoft has recognized the issues and is trying to better understand why we are triggering the reindexes ourselves. Note that you must also tick the box saying that you “acknowledge and agree to the statement above”, meaning the somewhat scary language about taxing the servers.

Here are the two dialogs where we can trigger reindexing manually. You must be a Site Owner (or Site Admin) to get to these settings.

First, on a Document Library. This can be found at / Library settings / More library settings / Advanced settings / Reindex Document Library.

Next, on a site. This can be found at / Site information / View all site settings / Search and offline availability / Reindex site.

If you decide to use these options, be sure to indicate the best reason why. I’m giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here and hoping they will improve the reindexing process using the data we provide them.