Chapter 9

Configuring Search Scopes and Search Results

IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL LEARN TO:

• MANAGE SEARCH SCOPES
  • Creating Shared Search Scopes
  • Creating a Site Collection Search Scope
  • Assigning a Search Scope
  • Configuring Search Center Tabs for Search Scopes
• CREATE METADATA PROPERTY MAPPINGS
  • Viewing Crawled Properties
  • Creating a New Managed Property
• CONFIGURE AUTHORITATIVE PAGES
• DEFINE KEYWORDS AND BEST BETS
  • Creating a Keyword
  • Adding a Best Bet
• REMOVE ITEMS FROM SEARCH RESULTS
• CONFIGURE FEDERATED SEARCH
  • Creating a Federated Location
  • Importing a Federated Location
  • Editing, Copying, Deleting, or Exporting a Federated Location
  • Configuring a Federated Search Web Part
• VIEW SEARCH REPORTS

A successful corporate search engine requires more than just a complete index of content; it also requires relevant and accurate results. The problem faced in most organizations is that the types of results users need are not easily determined by the search engine itself. Internet search engines can make use of large numbers of search queries across a wide range of content to compile statistics on the most popular results, which can then be ranked more highly. However, in an organizational context, much of the content will contain similar keywords and the most important results will not necessarily be the most popular.

SharePoint 2010 contains an enhanced query engine that provides better relevancy ranking than previous versions. Still, even with the best ranking, if too many results are returned, then the pages or documents that the user is looking for may not appear in the first few pages of the result set. The best experience for users will come by combining optimized relevancy ranking of results returned from a narrow subset of the content, thereby improving the probability of locating the right items. In this chapter, we will explore both ways to narrow the search domain through search scopes and methods for improving the relevancy ranking through authoritative pages and leveraging ranking logic in SharePoint 2010.