Define Content Sources

The SharePoint 2010 search engine can crawl and index various types of contents. The crawled content sources can include the following types of sources:

• SharePoint sites

• Websites

• File shares

• Exchange public folders

• Line of business data

• Custom repository

One of the first steps is to get SharePoint Search to index the local SharePoint sites. To do so, perform the following steps:

1. Go to the administration page of your search service application, and choose Content Sources from the Crawling group of the Quick Launch navigation bar.
2. Click New Content Source.
3. Enter a name for the new content source and choose SharePoint Sites as the type of the content source.
4. Type the start addresses for the SharePoint sites. By default, you have to type the following URLs (in this example, the URL of the main SharePoint site is https://home.companyabc.com and the My Site web application is https://mysite.companyabc.com):

   • https://home.companyabc.com: for crawling the content

   • sps3://mysite.companyabc.com: for crawling people content

5. Choose one of the following options: Crawl Everything Under the Hostname for Each Start Address or Only Crawl the Site Collection of Each Start Address.
6. Define full and incremental scheduling for the content source crawling. During the full crawling, all items of content source will be crawled from scratch. Incremental crawling means that only the differences to the last crawling will be crawled.

   Schedules can be daily, weekly, or monthly; each of them can be configured granularly. For example, Figure 8.4 shows the settings for a weekly schedule.

   Figure 8.4. Managing crawl schedules.

   

7. Select the priority of this content source. Content sources with high priority will be processed over the content sources with normal priority during the crawling.
8. Select Start Full Crawl of This Content Source if you want to start the crawling process immediately.

The settings of content sources can be modified later. Just click on the name of the content source, select Edit operation from its context menu, and you get the same configuration page.