Resetting the default search collection

Under certain circumstances you might want to change the configuration of the portal site search collection. In this case you need to recreate the collection, as search collections cannot be modified.

The portal site default search collection is created at the first time when an administrator navigates to the search administration portlet Manage Search. This requires considerations about the configuration tasks related to the portal and Portal Search and about the sequence by which you perform these tasks. An example scenario might be that you want to perform a portal database transfer, for example, from the default database to a different database. In this case you need to create the portal site collection by navigating to the Manage Search portlet before you transfer the database. Otherwise your portal site collection will not be available after the database transfer.

If you created the portal site collection by navigating to the Manage Search portlet before you completely configured your portal and Portal Search, you might need to recreate the search collection. Example scenarios are as follows:

If the preferred language for the portal site crawler user ID did not match the language of the portal site search collection.
If you decide to change the default directory location for search collections in your portal installation. For information about how to do this, refer to Configuring the default location for search collections.
If the file path length for search collections exceeds its limit of 118 characters, the collection cannot be created. In this case specify a shorter value for the parameter DefaultCollectionsDirectory. For details about how to configure this parameter refer to Configuring the default location for search collections. This file path length problem can occur particularly when the portal site collection is created under Linux operating systems. For details about this refer to Creating the portal site search collection fails.
If you do not want summary information to be generated for your portal and web content and you therefore want to turn the summarizer off.
If you want to change the name of the search collection.

In such a scenario, proceed by the following steps:

Perform the required configuration tasks, for example, for the language or path settings.
Create a new search collection with the appropriate configuration settings.
Export the content sources from the default search collection. In a default portal installation these are the Portal Content Source, which contains portal pages and portlets, and the Web Content Manager (WCM) Content Source, which contains web content. For more information about exporting a search collection see the section about Exporting a search collection under Managing and administering Portal Search or the Manage Search portlet help.
Import these exported content sources into your new search collection. For more information about importing a search collection see the section about Importing a search collection under Managing and administering Portal Search or the Manage Search portlet help.
You can now delete the default search collection.

Portal Search performs a new crawl on the portal site search collection.

Notes:

On a multilingual portal site you can create multiple collections in different languages. For details refer to Crawling a multilingual portal site.
When you start the crawl for the first time, this might result in a warning message. You can ignore this message. For more detailed information refer to Crawling a portal site for the first time can result in a message.