Troubleshoot SharePoint 2007 Search And Use Search Syntax

 

Some of the web applications's search engine are not working in my company, next are some findings when I troubleshot and study SharePoint Search Engine.

 

1. Make sure the search indexing server can access the WFE servers.

 

There are several reasons that index server fails to access the WFE server.

 

A. The index server is configured as WFE by mistake.

When index server is assigned WFE (web front end) role, the index server needs to be configured exactly as a WFE since the crawler will try to access the local web server for crawling.

 

What happens in real life is that, index server is assigned WFE but not configured as WFE (3rd party or unitility software are not installed as WFE). Thus the web server is not working at all.

 

B. The index server is configured as WFE but Windows loopback check security prevents the crawler from accessing the local web server. (Crawler is pretty much a TCP/HTTP client).

 

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 how to configure the windows web server to workaround this.

 

So why the trouble to configure search indexing server as WFE? There is no reason for doing this. Just disable the WFE role of indexing server will save you a lot of trouble.

 

Try to browse to the target web site from indexing server using IE, if you can browse to it most likely the crawler will able to do it too.

 

2. The search cannot find files by file name.

 

A big limitation of SharePoint search is that it does not put "file name" at higher relevance than the content. Our engineers just couldn't find the file they uploaded to the SharePoint site by name. The link to the file is many pages away in the search result.

 

The solution is to use the search syntax "filename:xxxx". Microsoft should do better to let end users to know these options than reading another document at http://www.susanhanley.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/searchsyntax.pdf by a non-microsoft company.

 

I am wondering where Microsoft documented these syntax? The google search of "sharepoint search syntax" returns poorly documented search feature at microsoft.com.