How to manage SharePoint Server 2010 Search Scopes

What is a search scope? When we use Baidu, we can see them. To help users more accurately find what they want, you can define search scopes so that users can use the search scope to tell the search engine the range of content they want to search for more accurate results.

The search functionality built into SharePoint Server 2010 also supports searching scopes. SharePoint 2010 already has a built-in definition of two search scopes: "All sites" and "people." The former includes all content from all content sources, and the latter only includes all users (from user profiles). If needed, administrators can also add additional search scopes to help users more easily search for desired content.

To create a custom search scope and make it appear in the SharePoint 2010 Search Center, you need to make some additional settings. This article demonstrates adding a Word document search scope to a SharePoint 2010 system, and allows users to search the search Center for easy access to Word documents.

(i) Add a search scope to the Search service application

Open the SharePoint 2010 Administration Center and open the search administration interface through the Manage Service Applications-Search Service application. Click the "Range" link on the left side of the search administration page and click "New Range".

Name the new range Word document, and then enter the "wordresults.aspx" page in the target results page. Don't worry, we'll create this page later in the Search Center site. This page will be used to display search results for the Word document search scope.

Next, add a rule for the Word document range. A rule defines which search results belong to a search scope. There are several types of rules, you can either use URL matching (for example, a range of content under a path) or use attributes (for example, where the content of the author equals Kaneboy is within a range), or the content source (for example, where the content from a BCS external data content source belongs to a range) to define the rule.