Acquia Search indexes your website, making any page or other entity findable by search. This topic describes what gets indexed and when.
Which items get indexed
You can configure which entity types (like nodes, taxonomy terms, files, commerce items, and users) on your website get indexed. By default, all content type nodes are indexed. To add other entities, you need to add contributed modules such as Apache Solr Attachments, Apachesolr User, or Apachesolr Term. You can exclude entity types from the search index by deselecting them on the Apache Solr search > Configuration > Default Index page, under Configuration.
When items get indexed
Acquia Search indexes your website every time cron runs. In ordinary operations, you don’t need to do anything for new and modified content to be added to your search index. However, you do have manual control over search indexing.
Indexing a large number of items at once can have a negative effect on your website’s performance. For that reason, the default behavior for Acquia Search is to index in increments of 50 items every time cron runs. You can modify the number of items to index per cron run on the Apache Solr Search > Configuration > Settings page, under Advanced Configuration. Note the higher you set this number, the faster your site will be indexed, but the more impact search indexing will have on your website’s server.
Manual control of search indexing
The Actions section on the Apache Solr Search Configuration > Default Index page gives you manual control over search indexing. You want to choose one of these options if you have new content you want to index at once:
Click Index queued content (50) to index as many items as running cron would.
Click Index all queued content to index all items that haven’t yet been indexed. This can put an increased load on your server and have a negative effect on your website’s performance.
Re-indexing your website
You can re-index your entire website by clicking Queue all content for re-indexing. Depending on the quantity of content on your site, this will take some time. In the ordinary course, 50 items will be indexed every time cron runs. You can re-index faster, at the cost of slower website performance, by then clicking Index all queued content.
Deleting the search index
To delete your search index, click the Delete the Search & Solr index button. Most users will never need to do this. The following situations may require you to use this option:
Your search index has become corrupt.
You must eliminate development data from the site index when you launch a site and add production data.
You move your Acquia subscription to a different website.
You switch from your own Solr server to Acquia Search, or vice versa.
Setting environments to read-only
In many use cases, you will want Acquia Search to index only your production environment and not your development or testing environments. You can set your non-production environments to read-only, so that searching is available on all your environments, but content changes on non-production environments will not affect your production search index. For information about how to do this, see Read-only Apache Solr search index.