Managing the Search Experience in Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Local Search Configuration Options

Site owners and list or library owners have configuration options that have an impact on search results.

Searchable Columns

At the site level, any column created within the site can be excluded from search results. For the root site of a site collection, this means all columns can be managed except those created at a subsite level. At the subsite level, only columns created at that level can be managed.

There is no granularity for this setting. The metadata contained in the column for any object within the site will be affected. To configure these settings, from the Site Actions menu, select Site Settings. On the Site Settings page, under Site Administration, select Searchable Columns to open the page shown in Figure 9-73. Locate the appropriate column, and select the box beside it.

Figure 9-73 Portion of the Searchable Columns page.

Site-Level Crawl Rules

At the site level, a site owner can set “do not crawl” rules for the entire site and set rules for crawling ASPX pages. To configure these settings, open Site Settings for the site and under the Site Administration heading, click Search And Offline Availability.

In the page shown in Figure 9-74, configure the appropriate indexing settings for the site in the Indexing Site Content section. Although not explicitly stated in the page documentation, the reason that the content does not appear in search results is that it is no longer crawled.

Figure 9-74 Search And Offline Availability page.

Frequently, the Web parts on pages expose content from other locations that all users do not have permissions to see. This content can also be crawled from the default location where everyone who can access the page can see all content. To prevent crawling the same content more than once, site owners can configure indexing options for Web parts within the site in the Indexing ASPX Page Content section of this page.

Crawl Options for Lists and Libraries

Each list and library can be configured with crawl rules by users who can manage the list or library. For the list or library, open the settings page and select Advanced settings. The fourth section down is the Search section, shown in Figure 9-75. Selecting No in the Allow Items From This Document Library (List) To Appear In Search Results will set do not crawl rules for the library or list.

Figure 9-75 List and library crawl setting.

Related Links Scope

At each site level, site owners can create a collection of contextual scopes that can be used as a single contextual scope at that site level only. Like all scopes, this configuration is stored at the search application level and requires the scope update to run before it is usable.

To open the Manage Search Scope For Related Links page shown in Figure 9-76, open Site Settings for the site and select Related Links Scope Settings under the Site Administration heading.

Figure 9-76 Manage Search Scope For Related Links page.

Type the full URL of the site in the Add URL box, including the protocol and with a slash “/” at the end. Click Add to add the link to the Selected Links list. Highlighting the URL and selecting Remove will move the link to the Available Links list. As you can see from Figure 9-76, the page will accept invalid URLs, which will simply not be added to the collection of contextual scopes when it is built.

After it is built, the scope will be available in the scope picker for searches only if the drop-down configuration includes contextual scopes. It will be available only for the single site where it was configured. This tool permits site owners a limited capability for building one additional scope for the users of the site.