Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator.

Hi Guys,

Here I want to share the issues which I encountered while working with the search service application in SharePoint 2013

In this post I am going to deal with these two errors

•   Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator.
• The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service.

Error1: Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator.

I have configured the service application and created some content sources and used to get the results as expected. But somehow suddenly I got this below issue (im not sure on the root cause but expecting this is the issue with the patching on server)

When I searched in the 15 Hive logs with the above correlation id, I found this below information saying "Unable to Connect to Index System"

Failed to create session for index system: SPf48ba6ea0462: Microsoft.Ceres.SearchCore.Services.ContentRouter.ContentException: Unable to connect to index system SPf48ba6ea0462     at Microsoft.Ceres.SearchCore.ContentRouter.ContentRouter.VerifyIndexSystem(String indexSystem)     at Microsoft.Ceres.SearchCore.ContentRouter.ContentRouter.OpenSession(String indexSystem, Action`1 callback, IDictionary`2 defaultPolicy)     at Microsoft.Ceres.ContentEngine.Processing.Mars.MarsWriterProducer.GetSession(String indexSystem)    ------10      SharePoint Foundation                  Logging Correlation Data   xmnv   Medium   Site=/         6ac1179d-715f-606d-5c6c-42baed190a9f

I searched on internet and grabbed the info from different sites and came to know that, the issue the search index partition is degraded.

To resolve this, we need to reset the index of the search service application and do the full crawl of the content sources.

In my case, I have 2 search service applications, so I ran this command to find which is in degraded state

$ssappn = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication

Get-SPEnterpriseSearchStatus –SearchApplication $ssappn[0].Name

and then

Get-SPEnterpriseSearchStatus –SearchApplication $ssappn[1].Name

The second service application given me the status like degraded

So I went to central admin and  then opened the second search service application (which was degraded) and did the index reset as shown below( you can find a link in the quick launch called “Index Reset” in search administration page).

It takes some time. Once it is completed, do a full crawl of your content source.This may solves issue in some cases and gives you the results... But in my case I did not get the results. I encountered the same issue as previous.

So i decided to delete this corrupted search service application (as it is dev enviroment)  to avoid issues for my search application (the first one in above)

So i deleted this corrupted second service application and try to perform the search. But this time i got new error 

Error 2 : The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service

Cause for this is the proxy for search service application doesn’t exist in the farm. This is responsible for the communication between webpart and the service application

So to resolve this issue, we need to create a new proxy. Run these commands to create

$searchServiceApp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication

New-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplicationProxy -SearchApplication $searchServiceApp

Now my results appeared  like charm :)

Hope this helps..

References :

http://www.thesysadminhimself.com/2013/08/sharepoint-search-index-partition-degraded.html

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2888383