Configuring SharePoint 2010 Search
You now look at configuring SharePoint 2010 Search. Configuring SharePoint 2010 Search is easy and can be done entirely through the UI of SharePoint 2010 Central Administration. The following sections mention the steps required for simple search requirements and also configuring the search scopes for more advanced requirements such as filtering search data based on content types.
Performing Basic Search Configuration
Perform the following steps for basic search configuration.
Now configure the search service application. As you learn in Hour 20, “Understanding Service Applications,” service applications have replaced the concept of shared service providers in SharePoint 2007. To configure the search service application, follow the steps in the following Try It Yourself.
Try It Yourself: Configure the Search Service Application
1. Browse to Central Administration, Application Management, and Manage Service Application.
2. Create a new search service application from the New menu if it does not already exist. This is shown in Figure 18.2.
Figure 18.2. New search service application screen
3. Browse to the newly created search service application. The home page of the service application with various information related to the status of the search is shown in Figure 18.3.
Figure 18.3. SharePoint 2010 Search Service Application
4. A content source should have already been configured. To verify click the Content Sources link on the left. You should be able to find the Local SharePoint Sites content source. Edit it to see the sites included in the content source and to modify the crawl schedules for this content source. Figure 18.4 shows the Edit Content Source screen.
Figure 18.4. Edit Content Source screen
5. You now need to crawl the content source. Browse to the Manage Content Sources page, open the linked menu, and click Start Full Crawl as shown in Figure 18.5. Wait for the crawl to finish.
Figure 18.5. Start Full Crawl
6. You can view the crawl logs by clicking the Crawl Log link on the left. This shows you a summary about the items that were crawled successfully and also errors and warnings that occurred as shown in Figure 18.6. You see more details by clicking on the numbers.
Figure 18.6. Search crawl logs
7. Go to your SharePoint site and perform a search for a keyword that you know exists in the site. You should see search results as shown in Figure 18.7.
Figure 18.7. Search results
Search will not show any results even if the crawl logs show data crawled successfully if the scopes show 0 items. You can verify this by clicking on the Scopes link on the left. To resolve this issue edit the permissions of the search services application and give access to the administrator or the appropriate users.
Configuring search is really simple. However, SharePoint Search is rich in its capabilities and you now look at some advanced configuration options.
Understanding Search Scopes
Many times you want to partition search into different categories based on the type of content. For example, you may want to search on technical resources or human resources data. Also at times you might want to filter a search based on specific parameters such as content types. Search scopes help you to achieve such functionality. SharePoint creates two search scopes by default. You can see these search scopes by clicking on the Scopes link on the left in the Search Service Application administration page. You can see the People and All Sites Scopes as shown in Figure 18.8.
Figure 18.8. Search scopes
Now try creating a new scope that searches data only for a specific content type.
Try It Yourself: Configure Search Scopes
1. Browse to your SharePoint Site and create a new content type named Technical Resources and having Parent Content Type as Document.
2. Add a new site column named TechnicalKeywords of type single line of text.
3. Go ahead and create some document libraries that use the new content type in the current site and subsites. Upload a few documents in these libraries using your new content type. Specify some comma-separated keywords in the TechnicalKeywords field.
4. Go to the Search Services Application and create a new scope called Technical Resource as shown in Figure 18.9 and click OK.
Figure 18.9. New search scope
5. Enable the ContentType managed property to be used in search scopes. Click the Metadata Properties link on the left in the home page of the Search Service Application. Search for the Content Type managed property and edit the property as shown in Figure 18.10.
Figure 18.10. Managed properties
6. Select Allow This Property to Be Used in Scopes as shown in Figure 18.11 and click OK.
Figure 18.11. Edit managed property
Managed properties are used in search queries. You need to map properties extracted from documents during a crawl to managed properties to enable search queries to be executed against these properties.
7. Go back to the View Scopes page and click the Add Rules link beside your new scope.
8. Set Scope Rule Type to Property Query (Author = John Doe).
9. In the Property Query section, select the ContentType property, add the value Technical Resources, and click OK. This is shown in Figure 18.12.
Figure 18.12. Edit search scope
10. Perform an incremental crawl of the Local SharePoint sites content source.
11. Once the crawl is finished browse to the Scopes page. Wait for some time if the scope does not show the status as ready, as shown in Figure 18.13. Once the search scope status is ready proceed to the next step.
Figure 18.13. Search scope status
12. To be able to use this scope for searching in your site, first create a search center site. Create a new subsite named BasicSearch of type Basic Search Center in your SharePoint site.
13. Go back to the top level SharePoint site and in Site Settings go to Search Settings.
14. Select the option Enable Custom Scopes (such as “All Sites”) by Connecting This Site Collection with the Following Search Center and enter /BasicSearch as the search center URL.
15. Select Show Scopes Dropdown for the Site Collection Search Dropdown Mode. The settings are shown in Figure 18.14.
Figure 18.14. Site Collection Search Dropdown Mode
16. Now go to Search Scopes in Site Settings. Click Display Groups. Edit the Search Dropdown group and select the Technical Resource scope as shown in Figure 18.15. Click OK.
Figure 18.15. Edit Search Dropdown group
17. Similarly edit the Advanced Search group and include the Technical Resource scope.
18. Run the iisreset command on the server and then browse to the home page of your SharePoint site. You should be able to see the Scopes drop-down list, and your Technical Resource scope will be present there as shown in Figure 18.16.
Figure 18.16. Search scopes in search control
19. Search within the different scopes and you should see results filtered by the selected scope. Figure 18.17 shows the search results page for a search performed on the Technical Resource scope. Four documents were uploaded in the SharePoint site and its subsite, and the word “Microsoft” was added in the TechnicalKeywords field. Also notice the search redirects you to the BasicSearch site created earlier.
Figure 18.17. Search results for the Technical Resource scope
Search scopes enable a lot of advanced scenarios in search. As you see in a subsequent section in this hour, you can create custom web parts that perform custom search queries based on the search scopes.