Run your own search reindex

In the past, the only way you could run a search reindex in your own knowledge base was to edit your Synonyms or to change your Primary search language, which would prompt you to run a reindex. If there were other reasons you needed to run a reindex, you had to reach out to our support team for us to run it for you.

We're proud to announce that those days are over. Now, you can trigger a search reindex yourself without having to make changes to synonyms or primary search language!

The details

We've updated Settings > Search to include a new section for running Search Reindexes, located between the Search Results and Search Weights sections:

The new Search Reindex section in Settings > Search

You'll be able to run one ad hoc search reindex per hour, though if you do edit synonyms or primary search language, you'll still be able to run a reindex to pull in those changes. You'll also see a date/timestamp of when the last reindex was run using that button. We've updated our search reindex documentation to include information on both types of reindexes.

Anyone with the default Editor role will be able to run a reindex. If you're using custom author roles, you must have the "Update search settings, synonyms, and reindex search" permission in Admin Permissions.

While it's rarely necessary to run a reindex, we did want to give you the power to do so, since it's our team's first step to troubleshoot problems with search results. We hope this makes it a little bit faster and easier for you to solve search issues on your own. 😉

With great power comes great responsibility

Reindexes will still disable full search results while they're running. So if your knowledge base is large or actively used, you'll want to wait to run these reindexes during off-hours, weekends, or so forth.

Most reindexes complete in under 5 minutes, but if your knowledge base is high-traffic or critical to your business, it pays to be mindful of when you're running it!