Setup continuous crawl at site collection level

Question

I have a web application under which there are several site collections.

https://mywebapp/sites/site1

https://mywebapp/sites/site2

https://mywebapp/sites/site3

https://mywebapp/sites/site4

By default all these site collections are being added into 'Local SharePoint sites' content source in search service application. Even if i have to create a new separate content source SharePoint is letting me create only at root level i.e. https://mywebapp and including all site collections within this content source. (provided this web application not listed in 'Local SharePoint sites' content source.)

My requirement is to turn on continuous crawling only on https://mywebapp/sites/site2. I dont want the search to be running continuously on all other site collections. How can I achieve this within search service application?

Appreciate all your help !!

Regards

Answer 1

SharePoint Content Sources are set for Web Applications, not sites. Sure you could restrict the crawl with Crawl Rules, but WHY? The way "Continuous Crawl" works is to request the changelog for the web application and then process the new and changed entries. If the other sites are not changed they will not be processed (I prefer "processed" to "crawl" because crawl implies a performance hit in spite of there being no changes.)

I would push back on the "requirement" and ask what they are concerned about. It is probably a lack of technical understanding.

Answer 2

Please try creating two different content sources and for one you can create Continuous Crawl and for others you can check on restricting the crawl to crawl only particular sites using crawl rule.

But I am not sure How surely it will work out.

You can also check on permissions of the site collection that need to be restricted.

Question here will arise is that, Why specifically that crawl frequency need to be separate for site collections?

However if you want to restrict your search engine to not crawl particular site it self, then you can add a crawl rule to include or exclude specific paths when you crawl content. When you include a path, you can provide alternative account credentials to crawl it. In addition to creating or editing crawl rules, you can test, delete, or reorder existing crawl rules.

Use crawl rules to do the following:

Prevent content on a site from being crawled.

For example, if you created a content source to crawl http://www.contoso.com, but you do not want the search system to crawl content from the subdirectory http://www.contoso.com/downloads, create a crawl rule to exclude content from that subdirectory.

Reference:

How to Create or Edit Crawl Rule

Create Crawl rule in SharePoint 2013