Today we had a fun issue to track down. After patching SharePoint (installing CUs and SP1) we noticed a certain site collection had issues with the Content Search Web Part (CSWP).
We tested everything:
- ✅ Query was returning results — visible in the test pane of the Build Query page
- ✅ Same query on a different site collection worked fine
- ✅ Site collection features were (almost) all activated
- ❌ Still nothing — very strange
The Cardinal Rule I Forgot
Check ULS.
After doing so, we noticed two lines at a high severity level pointing to a search-driven feature issue.
The Fix
Enable-SPFeature -ID 592ccb4a-9304-49ab-aab1-66638198bb58 -Url <URL of the affected site collection>Et voilà — working perfectly again 😊
The feature ID 592ccb4a-9304-49ab-aab1-66638198bb58 is the Search Server Web Parts feature. The patching process had apparently deactivated it on this specific site collection.
The strange part: the CSWP was still available to add to pages and everything looked normal — no visible indication that this feature was the dependency for actually displaying results. You’d only catch it in ULS.
Hope it helps someone!