User has a document library that he has used for years. Each document is a scanned image. Each document has a dozen or so metadata columns of info - type, department, purchase order number, vendor name, purpose, year, month, etc. When we perform a search for just this document library, and enters information about the metadata describing the file in the library, if the document is old - months old - it may or may not be returned. However, if the document is recent - as in 7 days or so old (or less) - the document does not return as a result of the searches. I went into the document library settings. The advanced settings is set to return documents. 10 of the metadata columns are marked in the indexed columns menu. SharePoint does say that this library contains a large number of items. I am uncertain how many items are in the library. It looks, to me, like some searchs occasionally return odd things - if one puts in purchase order 12-0506, the documents related to that are NOT returned, but a document which has a phone number that What actions can I take to resolve this issue? Note that I just tried a totally unrelated sharepoint site, where I had uploaded some documents earlier in the week. That document also is not being returned when I search just that document library for terms that should result in the document being returned. I have opened central admin, and taken a look at the shared services administration area. There are 2542 documents with the error "the crawler could not communicate with the server". We have 437977 documents successful crawl status (and 8535 with warning status), but even with ony 2500 error documents, I don't know for certain whether some of them from the two sites I checked might be among the number. In our case, both the crawling and the sharepoint server are all on the same box. I don't know what to do about these errors - they all seem to be from 15-16 days ago (and only on those two days - April 11 and 12). The system is set up to do a full crawl every day at 6pm, with incremental crawls during the day. However, when I look at the crawl log, all the dates are from the 11th or 12th, even the successful ones. I logged into the server, checked the services, and the sharepoint indexing service says that it was started. I restarted it (since the logs seem to indicate that nothing was happening). It looks, to me, like there was some sort of event on the 12th, and that since that time, the search crawling has not been occuring, even though the schedule seems to indicate that the event is set. I am looking for additional ideas of things to check, to try and get search working again. Thank you for all your help.

Have you run out of disk space where your index files are stored? SharePoint won't throw you an error, it will just stop working. If the index has corrupted, which could also be an issue, you might just have to blow it away and recrawl. Also, be sure that you are allowing enough time for your full crawl to finish before you are running another crawl or other maintenance tasks. Unless you are constantly adding new managed properties or some such, you likely do not need to be doing a full crawl every day.Imagine what we could be...if we could just imagine. | Daniel A. Galant | Sr. SharePoint Solutions Architect EPC Group.net

I am uncertain about the space. I took a look in central admin, and the only thing I saw that appeared to be related to the index location was a drive letter - D:. The D drive is about 25% used of a 120 GB or so drive. What I did find is that while the central admin page seemed to report daily that the crawler was scheduled to run, when I actually dug into the logs and looked at time stamps, nothing had been crawled for a couple of weeks. The service was still "running", but I was not seeing anything useful occur. I restarted the office index service and after the full index occurred, things began to be found again.