Configuring and Administering SharePoint Search

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 has a useful Search mechanism built in that allows users to search content both within the portal and outside the portal itself. This can prove to be valuable for organizations that want to consolidate and track information. Along with the increased search capabilities, however, comes the need to administer this system and to understand the individual administration points required.

Adding and Managing Content Sources

One of SharePoint's key features is the capability to index and search information not only in the portal itself but in multiple external sources as well. For example, a portal can be set up to crawl and index information from a competitor's website, or from the public folder store of an Exchange server. The following is a list of external source types that can be natively crawled by SharePoint Search:

• Exchange Server public folders Exchange public folders can be crawled and the information stored within them listed in the search index.

• Web site Information from a single web page or an entire site can be crawled and indexed by SharePoint.

• File share An interesting and useful feature of SharePoint is the ability to crawl the documents listed in a file share on the network. Results of the crawl are displayed when users run searches through SharePoint, and those results allow the users to automatically follow a link to the file on the file share itself.

To set up an external file source for crawling, perform the following steps:

1.	Click on Site Settings.
2.	Click on Configure Search and Indexing in the Search Settings and Indexed Content section.
3.	Click on Add Content Source in the General Content Settings and Indexing Status page.
4.	Select the type of content source to be added, as shown in Figure 17.15 and click Next. Figure 17.15. Adding a content source.
5.	Enter content source options such as the address and description of the content source, and how deep the crawl should search. Click Finish when complete.

Handling Noise Files

A noise file is a text file for each language that contains a list of noise words, or words such as "the," "as," "to," "I," and so on. These files do not show up on searches because they would only interfere with the search results. Noise files can be modified to add or remove specific words, as needed. For example, an organization may want to add the name of its company to the noise file because there would undoubtedly be too many search hits on the company name to be useful.

To modify these files, simply open them in a text editor and add or remove entries on each file. The noise files are kept in \Program Files\SharePoint Portal Server\DATA\Config and are listed by language. For example, the English noise file is noiseenu.txt.

Enabling and Understanding Advanced Search

By default, searches in SharePoint use two indexes, one for portal content and another for nonportal content. In some cases, it may be wise to stray from the norm in this case and set up different indexes for different types of data. In response to this, Microsoft included support for Advanced Search in SharePoint. This type of search capability allows administrators to identify other indexes, reset them, and manage them more effectively. Site administration becomes more complex this way, and the decision to utilize Advanced Search's functionality is final because there is no way to go back to the Search functionality. To enable Advanced Search, perform the following steps:

1.	On the portal site, click on the Site Settings link.
2.	Under Search Settings and Indexed Content, click on Configure Search and Indexing.
3.	In the General Content Settings and Indexing Status section, click on Enable Advanced Search Administration Mode, as shown in Figure 17.16. Figure 17.16. Enabling Advanced Search.
4.	When asked to confirm, click Yes.

After Advanced Search has been enabled, the following options become available in the various pages of the utility.

• Create an index

• Delete an index

• Reset an index

• Specify the index in which a content source is included

• Manage indexes