Sharepoint indexing and last modified date. Pages are static and served through Apache

Question

We are using Sharepoint for the search engine for our internal sites.

To get the last modified date, what does Sharepoint rely on? Is it the 'last-modified' header?

One of the sites has primarily static content, html, .doc, .ppt, .pdf etc. The search results show the last modified date for non-html pages (the ones we noticed were ppt, doc, xls, pdf).

For html/text pages, in 'some' cases we are seeing the date. However, for majority of the pages we are not seeing the date in the search results.

For the html/text pages which are showing a date, when I see the page through the browser, I see that there is a 'If-Modified-Since' request header. And, it is this date that's showing in the search results. There is not 'last-modified' header though. This is a bit confusing, perhaps partly due to my lack of proper understanding of 'If-Modified-Since' header?

Thanks for the help, Kris

Answer 1

welcome on SP.SE!

The if-modified-since header is just a performance enhancement - it will only fetch the page if it was changed since it fetched it last time.

Normally the web crawler uses the date when you start the crawl.

If you are on SP2013 you could try the following: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/de-DE/edb95223-7f4b-4e0a-a266-b232d427726c/sharepoint-2013-lastmodifiedtime-value-for-content-source-type-web-sites?forum=sharepointsearch