High Level Search Concepts

Essentially, there are two main components of search, the indexing and the querying. The indexing is the process in which all documents and content are reviewed and many key items about the item (meta data) are stored. The querying is when a user wishes to search for an item. The user enters keywords or phrases and the query engine looks at the indexed content and returns items that match.

The indexing process is called “crawling” and the indexed content is called “crawled content”. The querying and the query results (search results) is the end-user experience of the MOSS Search capabilities. Usually in a MOSS farm, there is one server dedicated to perform the indexing and the querying, however, these functions may be split out onto two separate servers. For this series, the assumption is the same server provides both services to the farm.

Office SharePoint Server Search Service

The server that runs the search service needs to have the Office SharePoint Server Search service started and configured. This is facilitated within Operations of the Central Administration (CA) and is managed by the Services on server settings.

The settings for the service will be investigated in the next article.

Search Settings

Once the service has been started on one of the servers in the farm, the next step is determining what will be crawled and how often. Of course, there are out-of-the-box default settings which will be shown here. The remainder of this article series will build upon the default configuration and expand the overall search experience within MOSS.

The search settings are governed by the Shared Services Administration within the SSP that was setup during the MOSS installation process. Clicking on the SSP name will bring up the overall settings.

Clicking on Search settings will show the main search settings screen in which most of the modifications within this series will occur.

This is where the content sources can be defined. From MSDN, a content source is a collection of start addresses representing content that should be crawled by the search index component.

Search Results

The results are based on the “scope” that is used for searching. There are two main out-of-the-box scopes; All Sites and People. A scope carves out a piece of the crawled content and determines what should be searched. It can be thought of a defined view of the crawled content. During this series a new scope will be created for a customized search experience.

The results appear on page within the MOSS system (within the Search Center by default) using a pre-defined web-part page which contains several out-of-the-box search web-parts. The main web part is the Search Core Results and its configuration determines the appearance and layout of the results.

This series will also dive into the customization of the Search Core Results web-part to include additional search fields based on the business data content source.

What’s Next?

The next article will dig a little deeper into the settings and configurations described above. The entire series will build out a scenario of adding content from an external data source (using the Business Data Catalog) and then enabling MOSS to return customized results.

Glossary of Terms

Based on the above discussions, the key terms are defined as follows:

Business Data Catalog (BDC) – an Enterprise feature in MOSS that allows for the retrieval of external data from other systems or databases.

Content Source – a collection of start addresses representing content that should be crawled by the search index component (Source: MSDN)

Crawling – the process at which the search engine retrieves information from a content source and produces appropriate indexes and properties based on the content that is found.

Full Crawl – the process of crawling all of the content available within a content source; the reindexing of previous crawled content may occur

Incremental Crawl – the process of crawling only new content from the previous full or incremental crawl.

Managed Properties / Meta Data Properties – Managed properties are the set of properties that are part of the search user experience, so to include a crawled property value in search functionality, it must be mapped to a managed property in the Document property mappings. (Source: MSDN)

Scope  - search scopes are a collection of items grouped together based on a common element among the items within that scope, which help users broaden or narrow the scope of their searches. (Source: MSDN)

References

Enterprise Search Architecture – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms570748.aspx