I was in the process of making all things pretty in SharePoint configuration and I got combated with the following error message The search application ‘f8cfe196-b555-4e72-bcbb-cf024cebbc24’ on server <> did not finish loading. View the event logs on the affected server for more information.

As a common practice, “google it” but what’s out there was delete the search service and recreate… that was not an option for me because I had just finished making things pretty so I took the challenge, and it lead me to different places with final destination being WSS_Admin_WPG group. So the fix was pretty simple

• Navigate to Local Users and Groups on your SharePoint Server
• Find the WSS_Admin_WPG group and ensure that you have your Search Service account and your farm account in it.
• Find the WSS_WPG group and do the same.
• Go back to your Search Service application and it’s magically working…

Happy SharePointing