Creating your own Search Center in MOSS 2007
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- Published: Saturday, 05 September 2009 01:51
Many people asked me on what is the best, yet the easiest, way to build your own search center in MOSS especially if you need to create different search centers for the same application. Example multilingual sites with search center for each language.
I know there are a lot of article on the web like this but this one is intended to follow the full path with ease and clarity as SharePoint Gurus is accustomed to present.
{tips}Click the thumbnails in the aritcle to enlarge the images{/tips}
Log in to the Central admin, go to the Shared Services Provider you run the search for this application then click “Search Settings” from the Search tab.
From the “Scopes “ section click “View Scopes”
Here you will see all the scopes. By default there will be “People” and “All Sites” . Click the “New Scope” icon from the bar.
Now give a name for your scope, it is better be short and descriptive. For this scope I choose “English” as it is meant to search the English site”. It is also better to give the name of the search results page you intend to use. We will create this page later.
Now you see that your scope is added but empty because it is not defined. To do that click on “Add rules”.
Now the rule page will come. You can see the options that you can use to filter the search results in this scope. In our case we want to search the English site so we will choose “Web Address” and there we will put the full path to the English root page of our site. Make sure that the “Behavior” is “Include”.
Now the new scope is ready but not yet available because we did not update the scope to include the results.
Go back now to Search Administration, and click Start Update now from the System Status section. You will notice that it says that 1 scope, or more, needs update.
After a while you will see the that the update was done, to make sure your work is file, click “Scopes” from the “Queries and Results” left menu. This will take you back to the scopes page, now you see that the scope you added is Ready and it has a number of items.
Now go back to your English site, and create an site from: Site Actions > Create Site.
Give your site a proper name, language and a URL path, then choose Enterprise > Search Center from Site Templates section.
{note}If you want your search center to include the classic tabs choose Search Center with Tabs.{/note}
Now your search center is created. We want the main search page to search in our customized results page. To do that go to the search page, choose: Site Actions > Edit Page.
From the Search Box web part click: edit > Modify Shared Web Part.
Now the web part properties column appears, expand the “Miscellaneous” section and make sure that the “Target search results page URL” value point to “<your search site URL>/results.aspx”.
Now do a search and make sure your results page is the one you chose not the default search results page under the “_layouts” folder. Now you notice that the results are coming from all sites, we want to change this to bring the results only from the scope we created earlier. To do this click: Site Actions > Edit Page from the result page.
Go to “Search Core Results” web part then click: edit > Modify Shared Web Part.
Expand the “Miscellaneous” section from the web part properties box and fill the “Scope” box with the name of the scope we created earlier. In this case it was “English” then click OK.
Now the search results page should bring the results from the scope we created. Still one point that the search center look is the classic SharePoint look. We need to change that to match our site’s master page. To do so go to: Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify All Site Settings and from Site Administration tab choose: Site Features.
Activate the “Office SharePoint Publishing Features” from this page.
Now search your new site, you will get search results only from the English site you created the scope for in a fully branded search pages that uses your website’s master pages.
Voila. Here is your new serch center just as you wanted it. Hope this was useful for all.