Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Tuning Search Results

After you have gathered all the content and made it available to your site collection, you can modify search settings so that it returns the most relevant results for your site users. You do this by configuring relevance settings, defining managed properties to use in search scopes, and configuring keywords. You can use the search usage statistics to view what searches are being executed and then modify all of these settings over time to improve results for your users.

Configuring relevance settings to prioritize content

After you have created search scopes to slice the content sources into manageable pieces for the user, you can further improve the search experience by prioritizing the relevance, and therefore the order in which the content is returned, of results. Relevance settings work in concert with the other factors that determine the results order such as keywords, managed properties, and search engine weighting factors.

You can define sites and pages as either authoritative or non-authoritative and search will use these definitions to rank the results. SharePoint provides three levels of authoritative pages so that you can rank first, second, and third level authoritative pages or sites as well as define sites that are not authoritative. The resulting ranking options are as follows:

• Most authoritative: The highest level of relevance is given automatically to the top-level Web applications. You can also choose to highlight key business data and process ...