Search Scopes

After defining content sources, they have to be organized to search scopes to make available the search results to the users and to refine them. Search scopes also can be configured on the admin page of the search service application, by the following steps:

1. Go to the administration page of your Search Service Application, and choose Scopes from the Queries and Results group of the Quick Launch navigation bar.
2. Click New Scope.
3. Add a name and an optional description to the scope (for example, SharePoint Documents).
4. If you’ve already defined a search center (see later), you can specify a target result page for this scope as well; for example, /search/Pages/results.aspx. Otherwise, you can select the default Use the Default Search Results Page option.
5. Save the scope.
6. Define the rules for the content source. You can add one or more rules to each scope and connect them with various behaviors. The types of rules that can be configured are the following:

   • Web address— This type of rule can be created to create search scopes that include content in the search index that has a URL.

   • Property Query— This kind of rule can be defined to make property restrictions in the scopes.

   • Content Source— You can include all the content of the defined content sources by this rule.

   • All Content— All indexed content will be added to this rule.

   These rules can behave in three different ways:

   • Include

   • Require

   • Exclude

   For example, in the scope SharePoint Documents, the content source Local SharePoint Sites has to be included, and the property IsDocument has to be required.

7. By default, there are only a few properties available in the Property Query of scopes, but this list can be extended with other properties. Just go to the Metadata Properties from the group Queries and Results in the Quick Launch navigation bar. Here you can find all the defined properties.

   When editing the IsDocument (or any other) property, you can find a check box Allow This Property to Be Used in Scopes. Check this and save the changes.

   Go back to the scope definition, and the IsDocument property is already available for filtering.

8. After creating each of the rules you need for the scope, the scope has to be updated. This can be done both automatically and manually: SharePoint 2010 runs a timer job in every 15 minutes to update the scopes, but there is an option to do it before the next updating manually: Go to the administration page of the Search Service Application, and click Start Update Now in the System Status section. Here you can see how many scopes are needed to update.

After following these steps, the scope is ready to use: It can be assigned to the Search box at the top of your SharePoint pages, Search Center pages, or search controls on each SharePoint pages.