Doing some research on SharePoint search limitations, I stumbled across this one for both SP 2013 and SP Online:
“Size of document that can be downloaded by the crawl components: 64 MB, 3MB for Excel spreadsheets”
with the added detail: “Search downloads metadata and content from a document until it reaches the maximum document size. The rest of the content is not downloaded.”
I don’t know how to interpret this. Does it mean that full-text search is limited to the first 64 MB of the file (well, really the what’s left after metadata is read, which I realize is very small) and that everything else in the file is not read, and therefore not actually searchable in SP search?
Or does the indexer not need to “download” to fully index a file?
A clearer “this is what this means” interpretation would be much appreciated.
See attached screenshot from one of the sources.
