SharePoint 2013 Searches return no results even though content sources were crawled successfully

Recently, a client of mine using SharePoint 2013 changed the URL of their site. A couple of weeks later, they noticed that search was not returning any results. I checked in ULS and noticed some errors indicating that the Content Source had not been updated with the correct URL. I made the change in search administration and did a recrawl. The crawl found several thousand items and had no errors.

Unfortunately, we still weren't getting any search results. The problem didn't appear to be with the index, but I cleared the index and rebuilt it just to be sure. Still no results. I also noticed that there was nothing useful in ULS to help me track down the problem.

On a suggestion from a colleague, I created a new web application and associated it with the same search service application. I added some dummy content to that new web application and indexed it. When I ran a search from within that search application, I was getting results. Progress - now I knew that my search service application appeared healthy.

We decided to see if the problem was the content or the site itself. We took a backup of the content from the production web application and restored it to the new web application we had just created. We then rebuilt the index and ran a test. Search worked perfectly. So our problem wasn't the content.

Now that we had narrowed down the problem to our web application, we had a pretty easy fix. We waited for a maintenance window and then removed the web application. We then provisioned a new web application with the correct settings for our production environment and attached the content database from the original. After another rebuild of our index, we had working search results.

Difficulties with SP2013

I'm a little late to the party this time, but I've finally carved out some time to play with SharePoint 2013. I've noticed two things so far:

1. SharePoint 2013 chews CPU a lot more than SharePoint 2010 did.
2. The install has been flaky for me, perhaps due to point 1.

I've had several failed installs so far and they present weird errors when they do. The first failure I had wouldn't let me create managed accounts. I did a reinstall and failure number two wouldn't provision site collections correctly .

The site I created using the wizard resulted in this:

I created a new web application and then got this during the site collection creation:

That Correlation ID led to this error in the logs:

A large block of literal text was sent to sql (length 93794).  This can result in blocking in sql and excessive memory use on the front end.

I did three things that seem to have addressed the issue:

1. Uninstalled SharePoint and deleted the 14- and 15-hives.
2. Upped the RAM on my dev box from 4Gig to 8Gig.
3. Reinstalled SharePoint