Whenever I do a search, “Nothing found” or only a few but not all matching pages are returned. What can I do?

DokuWiki uses an index to provide fast full text search results. Because indexing a page takes some time, this is not done while saving a page, but in the background when a page is viewed.

To make sure the index cannot be corrupted, it is automatically locked when a page is indexed. This means only one page at a time is added to the index. On busy wikis this may cause the index to be slightly delayed behind the updates. So you just need to wait a while and your wiki should be indexed while users browse the pages.

The indexing process is triggered by a small image embedded in the template which will call the indexing script. If you use a third party template, the template developer might have forgotten to add this “webbug” in the template. You should check your main.php template for the existance of the tpl_indexerWebBug() function.

If you are sure the webbug is called, but still no search results are returned you should check for a possible error by calling http://yourwiki.com/dokuwiki/lib/exe/indexer.php?id=wiki:syntax (or often better with a debug parameter: http://yourwiki.com/dokuwiki/lib/exe/indexer.php?id=wiki:syntax&debug=1). If everything is correct a 1×1 pixel transparent GIF image should be returned.

If you are using Microsoft IIS with PHP as CGI you need to enable the broken_iua option or the indexing process will not work.

Sometimes it may be necessary to build the index manually. Eg. if you copied many pages to the data directory. You can do so with the indexer.php commandline script or the searchindex plugin.