MOSS Enterprise Search. Part 1
In this series of MOSS Enterprise Search How-To's I'd like to share the knowledge I received from a recent training on setting up the MOSS search engine. In this post I will show how to setup content sources and crawling rules.
Setting up content sources:
1. Navigate to the Search Administration page
- Open SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration web page under Start -> Administrative Tools and click on SharedServices link on the left side navigation menu under Shared Services Administration
- In Search section click on Search Settings:
2. Add content sources and start crawling:
- Click on the link to the right of "Content Sources"
- On the "Manage Content Sources" page click on New Content Source button
- Add Content Source Page contains various settings defining the content source you want to setup.
First you need to add a name for the content source and decide on the content source type;
Here I would like to talk about difference between first two content types (SharePoint Sites and Web Sites):
- They both allow you to specify Start Addresses for crawling; for a Web Site content type this can include any content, from a single web page to an entire web site; for a SharePoint Sites type this can only include MOSS sites and WSS sites;
- For Crawl Settings, this is where the difference between the two comes: in a Web Sites Content Source, you can specify that you only want to crawl the server of which you entered the start address, or only crawl the first page, or provide custom crawl settings, where you can specify Server Hops and Page Depth;
- Page Depth - number of links to follow within the same hostname; for example if you specify Page Depth of 1, crawler will follow links from the home page and then stop;
- Server Hops are the number of host name changes that the crawler can make;
- Another difference is that SharePoint content source allows to crawl a single WSS site collection, which you can't do with a Web Site content source, e.g. if you want to crawl a particular site collection you should put its URL in a SharePoint content source like http://servername.com/sites/yourcollection and select "Crawl only the SharePoint site of each start address". If you put the same exact address for a Web Server content source, it will start crawling from the top address http://servername.com because it's the default for all Sharepoint content:
And the last step is to create a schedule (or select an existing one) for full and incremental crawls of this content source.
And if you select the "Start full crawl of this content source" check box then the crawl starts right after you click "Ok" button to save the content source settings. Otherwise the crawl will work according to the specified schedule.
In the next post of the series I will show how to create search scopes