Populating a Search Catalog
Populating A Catalog
If you did not select the start build now check box when defining
your catalog, you need to tell Search to build a catalog for you. You
can start a full or incremental build at any time, such as after releasing
a large amount of new content to a site.
To start a full build, select the required catalog under the Catalog
Build Server group. Then either right click and choose Task
then Start Build, or select the 
icon from the toolbar.
To start an incremental build you would select Start Incremental
Build from the Tools menu or select the 
icon from the toolbar.
Once a build has started you can monitor its progress by selecting
the Status tab on the catalog properties screen. This provides
information about when the last and previous build were started/completed
and how many documents exist in the catalog.
Scheduled Builds
It is also possible to tell Search to schedule a full or incremental
build at regular times to maintain the content of catalogs. An ideal
time may be at 2:00am when you might expect less hits to the server.
To define a scheduled build, select the catalog you are interested
in, right click and choose Properties, then go to the Schedule
Builds tab. You can then set build to be scheduled daily, weekly,
monthly, when idle, etc. By default a check box on the Settings
tab is selected to have the task stop after 72 hours - which might prove
useful.
Gatherer Logs
Each time a build is completed, a file is added to the Gatherer Log
section. This maintains a history of how the search was executed, which
files were found and any error messages that the build process encountered.
You can configure the number of log files that Search maintains by
selecting the Logging tab from the catalog properties screen.
To view the log files from MMC, double click the required catalog under
Catalog Build Server to expand its tree and click the Gatherer
Logs item. This will then give you a screen to query the log files.
Log files, by default, are stored in the subdirectory 'Data\Search\GatherLogs\'
under the MS Site Server installation directory. The catalog name and
log version number is used to generate the file name, i.e. the file
name for log number 3 for the 'devguru' catalog will be 'devguru.3.gthr'.
They can become very large so it's best not to open them using Notepad.
