I have been working with some SharePoint crawl errors today that look something like this [error] The SharePoint item being crawled returned an error when attempting to download the item [/error] There are a couple of solutions that need to be implemented to resolve this crawling failure. First off we need to tweak the registry to use the correct user-agent string
- Open Regedit on your search server(s)
- Navigate to this registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager
- Change the value of “UserAgent” from “MSIE 4.01″ to “MSIE 8.0″
- Restart the SharePoint Search Service.
Secondly we need to ensure we have the Sessions State Service enabled so that reporting in Access Services works without error.
- Open a SharePoint PowerShell
- Get-SPSessionStateService
- If this returns false then we need to deploy one
- Enable-SPSessionStateService -DatabaseName “NameOfDatabase”
Now lets go back and re-run that crawl
