This button refreshes the information that you can see on the page, which means it will:
- actualise the facets list;
- actualise the results list;
- actualise the data about the index (like number of records, index size, data size, etc.).
You may notice that something changes from time to time for various reasons, including but not limited to:
- records are being created/updated/deleted (which would impact the list and total number of hits);
- facets are being created/updated/deleted (which would impact the available facets on the left side);
- configuration is being modified (which would impact the list and total number of hits).
As these kind of operations do not happen very frequently for most use cases, refreshing doesn't often have an impact, as this doesn't change anything on the index itself, but just makes sure you see the up-to-date interface in the explorer.
A case where it can be more useful, for example, is when you have lots of records operations happening in real time. Those changes are never triggered by us, but may come from an automated script or a backend implementation that synchronises your Algolia indices with your internal database.