How long until deleted topics leave search results?

[TR Lisa]

I have draft topics that keep sneaking in to my production builds for various reasons not caused by Flare. I delete them but they seem to remain in search results forever and then throw a 404 when clicked in the results list. How long before these go away and is there anything I can do to expedite? Using MadCap search engine. HTML5 output. Thanks!

[doc_guy]

MadCap generates a search index every time you generate output. I'm guessing that old index files aren't being deleted, so they are being discovered by the javaScript that goes and does the actual searching.

Make sure you clean your output folder and make sure where you publish you help you are deleting all files before you upload new ones. Specifically content in the >DATA> folder. That should do the trick.

[TR Lisa]

Yep that probably explains it. We don't do a full publish/replace very often because it's like a 3-day process to copy the output from QA to staging and then staging to production. I may try to delete and copy over the data folder contents and see if that helps. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!

[NorthEast]

If the production content is published to a web server, it could be a caching issue.

The company I work for uses a product called Cloudflare, which caches web data, and this effectively delays how long it takes to see updated files in our published targets.
For example, when I publish a target, I can see updated topic (*.htm) files almost instantly, but it may take a few hours for other file types like javascript (*.js) or CSS (*.css) files to be 'refreshed' in Cloudflare's cache. This means that I don't see updated search results or style changes for a few hours, even though I can see new topics.

Provided that the search works fine on your local build, then it should work exactly the same when published to a web server.
If it doesn't, then ask your IT/web admins, as it could be a product like Cloudflare.

[bunnycat]

I second Dave Lee's response - it may be a server/replica caching issue. We had similar issue where we'd publish new content to Akamai host, but it wouldn't refresh CSS or JS files for hours/days. It was a caching issue between all the load-balanced servers not calling home to get the new content. Your host may or may not have a way you can purge the cached files between the servers.

We also utilize the Flare publishing Destinations settings to do some of the work for us on getting rid of stale files. The Upload setting has a setting for Remove Stale Files. That usually does the trick to get rid of stale search segment files.