How to add Local Farm to permissions on Search Service Application

Solution

If the Local Farm (account) is not on the permissions of Search Service Application and users try to perform a search on any SharePoint site they will get an error and a correlation ID - something like below:

In ULS logs you'll notice the below error:

"SearchServiceApplicationProxy::GetUserPreferenceSerializeHelperForTenant–Error occured: System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityAccessDeniedException: Access is denied."

There is a fix on this blog but it doesn't fix the issue (at least not in my case).

So the solution is to run the following powershell commands:

 $farmID = Get-SPFarm | select id
$farmID

Copy the GUID returned from $farmID and go to Search Service Application click on Permissions and paste the GUID and grant Full Permissions.

by Constantin Ionut via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community