Beginning SharePoint® 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007

14.3. Customizing and Managing Search

Now that you know how to use a basic and advanced search, it's time to see how you, the SharePoint administrator, can customize and manage the search service. For example, you can create content sources that search for documents across multiple websites or information systems, or create scopes in an existing content source to narrow search queries to a smaller set of data. This section details the process of creating new content sources and scopes to improve a user's search experience. Before you design any customized search, you should query the people who will use it to determine the following:

• What information storage locations do you want to search for using the SharePoint Search?

• What file formats will you store in the environment that you want to include in the content index?

• When you search for people in the organization, what properties do you use?

• How soon after a document is added to the system should it be available via the search interface?

In this section of the chapter, you learn some of the search customization alternatives SharePoint offers, which in turn will give you tips on how to best address your user's requirements. Because you want to make sure that your search goes to the right location, you learn about content sources, which are the locations that SharePoint looks to when you enter information into the SharePoint search interface. For accurate search results, you need to keep your information up-to-date, which you can ...