You can purge the contents of the search collection. You might want to purge the cluster in staging or development systems, or if you want to clean out the search collection without re-installing all the nodes. Purging (and rebuilding) the search collection may also be useful in a dire situation where the contents of the cluster are corrupted beyond repair and good checkpoints are not available for recovery.
By default, the checkpoints and index queue are left in place. This allows you to rebuild the local index on a node where the archive appears to be corrupted. You can add a flag to the command to remove the checkpoints.
Sometimes the purge command does not work properly, where it fails to purge the index files. During this scenario the search file structure gets tainted and the Search Service will not start up.
Failed Unexpected exception while sending PURGE to searchserver01, Error during parsing: Failed -- purge failed on streetfighter01 This node should be shutdown, purged, and restarted manually.
At this point you will not be able to shut down, purge, or restart the Search Service. You must re-run the Oracle WebCenter Interaction installer. Select only the Search Service option and choose overwrite.