Resolving “The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service” error message in the Search Results page

I ran into the following error message on the Search Results page while troubleshooting SSA (Search Service Application) for one of our Fortune 500 client’s SharePoint Server 2010 farm:

“The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service”

Curious, I thought.The client’s SSA (Search Service Application) was already up and running, with a full crawl running in the background … which meant that the Search service was definitely up, alive and kicking.

Even though the crawl was not completed, I knew from previous experience that we should be getting some results back on the Search Results page by querying for relevant terms (the crawl process had been running for some time, and the index was already getting populated, a fact confirmed through the Administration page for the SSA).

If you are tempted to think that this has anything to do with the Search Results page itself, you are probably looking in the wrong direction.Taking a closer look at the SSA through the Manage Service Applications page (accessible through the Central Administration site – /_admin/ServiceApplications.aspx), I discovered that something was missing:

Where was the SSA proxy?It looked like during the scripted creation of the SSA, the portion of the script responsible for provisioning the proxy failed, and the SSA proxy consequently did not get created.This leads me to my next point: you cannot independently create an SSA proxy through Central Administration (without creating a new SSA).It’s one of the areas of SharePoint 2010 that is not fully administrable through the Central Administration web site, however is maneuverable easily enough in PowerShell, and can be provisioned and associated with the relevant SSA by running the script below (after modifying appropriately for your environment):

$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication -Identity <Plug in appropriate SSA name here>

$ssaProxy = New-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplicationProxy -Name <Plug in name for new SSAProxy here> -SearchApplication $ssa

# Bring SSAProxy Online if necessary – it should be Online by default

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If (($ssaProxy.Status) -ne “Online”)

{

Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow “New SSA Proxy $ssaProxy is offline … turning it online …”

$ssaProxy.status = “Online”

$ssaProxy.Update | Out-Null

Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green “New SSA Proxy $ssaProxy is now Online”

}

On a related note, if you are interested in scripting out the provisioning process for SSAs for your environment, be sure to check out this blog post from Russ Maxwell to get you started.

Getting back to the issue at hand … Done!The SSA proxy is now present and associated with the SSA

And your search results page should now … well … be giving you results. If not, another configuration item that can be looked at includes the proxy group that the SSA proxy belongs to (and making sure it is associated with the SharePoint web app where the problematic search results page can be found). You can do this by browsing to the “Web Applications Management” page (accessible through the Central Administration site – /_admin/WebApplicationList.aspx). Select the appropriate web app, click on “Service Connections” link on the “Web Applications” tab of the ribbon, and ensure the appropriate SSA proxy is selected to serve as a connection point to the appropriate Search Service Application.

I hope this helps someone out there, the next time you see an error message like the one above, browse to the “Manage Service Applications” page and look for a missing SSA proxy.