Adding crawl component

Crawl components process crawls of content sources, propagate the resulting index files to query components, and add information about the location and crawl schedule of content sources to their associated crawl databases. Crawl components are associated with a single Search service application. You can distribute the crawl load by adding crawl components to different farm servers.

You assign a farm server to participate in crawling by creating a crawl component on that server. If you want to balance the load of servicing crawls across multiple farm servers, add crawl components to the farm and associate them with the servers that you want to crawl content.

To add a crawl component to a Search service application

1. Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is a member of the Farm Administrators group.

2. In Central Administration, in the Application Management section, click Manage service applications.

3. On the Service Applications page, click the name of the Search service application to which you want to add a crawl component.

4. On the Search Administration page, in the Search Application Topology section, click the Modify button.

5. On the Manage Search Topology page, click New, and then click Crawl Component.

6. In the Add Crawl Component dialog box, in the Server list, click the farm server to which you want to add the crawl component.

7. In the Associated Crawl Database list, click the crawl database that you want to associate with the new crawl component.

8. In the Temporary Location of Index field, you can optionally enter the location on the server that will be used for creating the index files before propagating them to the query components. If you want to accept the default location, leave the contents of this field unchanged.

9. Click OK to add the new crawl component to the job queue.

On the Manage Search Topology page, click the Apply Topology Changes button to start the SharePoint timer job that will add the new crawl component to the farm on the specified server.

To remove a crawl component from a Search service application

1. Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is a member of the Farm Administrators group.

2. In Central Administration, in the Application Management section, click Manage service applications.

3. On the Service Applications page, click the name of the Search service application to which you want to add a crawl component.

4. On the Search Administration page, in the Search Application Topology section, click the Modify button.

5. On the Manage Search Topology page, click the crawl component that you want to remove, and then click Delete.

6. In the message box that appears, click OK to add the removal of the crawl component to the job queue.

7. On the Manage Search Topology page, click the Apply Topology Changes button to start the SharePoint timer job that will delete the crawl component from the farm.