Assign Search Pages to the Scopes

Whatever type of search center you deploy, you can create more than one search results page. If you have Enterprise or FAST Search Centers, these pages can be displayed on tabs on the top of all result pages so that the navigation can be easy as well.

The steps for creating a new page and displaying it as a tab are as follows:

1. Open the Site Actions menu and choose the New Page action.
2. Type the name of your page; for example, Documents.
3. Click Create, and the page will be created immediately in the Pages library.
4. The page can be edited as any other page in SharePoint 2010. To learn how to create a new search results page, see the subsequent section of this chapter titled, “Creating Custom Search Pages.”
5. On the top of any result page of this search center, there are multiple tabs. In Edit mode, there are also two options for managing the tabs: Add New Tab and Edit Tabs.
6. Click Add New Tab, and type a tab name and the page name just created (for example, documents.aspx). Typing a tooltip is optional but can be useful to provide detailed information about the results page to the end users.
7. To display the same tab on the Welcome Page of the search center, repeat steps 5 and 6 on the Welcome Page as well.
8. Click Save, and the tab is ready to be used.

Of course, these search results pages also can be customized. For example, you can filter the results for a specified scope:

1. Open the Site Actions menu on your search results page, and choose Edit Page.
2. Locate the Search Core Results web part on the page, and edit it.
3. Expand the group Location Properties of the web part settings. Here you can find the field Location, where you can select the list of Federated Locations if you want to use one of them.

   You can also find here the Scope field, where you can type the name of your scope to be used on this search results page (for example, Documents), as shown in Figure 8.7.

   Figure 8.7. Assign a scope to the search results page.

   

4. Save the web part settings; then save and close the page. Now, your page is filtered by the selected scope.

To assign this page (documents.aspx) to a specified scope (Documents), go to central administration and open the admin page of your search service application. Then follow these steps to finish the configuration of scopes and pages:

1. Open the Scopes list from the group Queries and Results on the left navigation bar.
2. Select the scope you want to modify, open its context menu, and choose Edit Properties and Rules action.
3. On the next page, select Change Scope Settings.
4. Here you can find the field Target Results Page. Select the radio button Specify a Different Page for Searching This Scope and type the URL of the page you’ve configured for this scope (for example, https://home.companyabc.com/ootb_search/Pages/documents.aspx).
5. Click OK and your changes will be saved.