To configure the search element of MOSS you first need to navigate to Central Administration->Shared Services->YourSharedServiceProvider link or directly to the SSP administration interface. The Search Section consists of two settings:

• Search Settings
• Search Usage Reports

Search Settings
The Search Settings section offers three main sections; Crawl settings; Scopes and Authoritative Pages.

Crawl Settings is split into two sub-sections; an information section and a list of available configuration options. In the information section the Errors in Log value should be checked periodically and when clicked inform of any crawl issues. The Default Content Access Account is important as this account needs read permissions to any URLs or Shared Folders you may have specified.

Manage Content Sources is where you can specify where your data is that you want to include in search. For creating a new content source (the location of where the data is) click on Manage Content Sources then New Content Source.

Initially give the source a useful name, then identify the location of the content. There are four different types allowed these being SharePoint Sites, Web Sites, File Shares and Exchange Public Folders. All of the settings take a typical http:// except for the File Shares which accepts a file://server or \\server value. The next setting is to choose whether to crawl the sub-folders or just the top-level folder names given.

You can also specify a recurring time of day or week in which to crawl for new files and information. It is important to ensure that the Default Content Access Account has permission to read access the data sources specified here. More fine grained permission control can be set by creating a Crawl Rule so a specified URL or Folder Share can be assigned different authentication from the default.

Add Server Name Mapping is also in that it allows you to replace a back-end sharename which could cause problems for remote users such as \\server\shares\deptashares to something more friendly like http://friendlyname.

Scopes allow crawled information to be grouped and limited and these scopes made available to various areas. In order to apply rules to a scope the scope has to be initially created with a title and a description. Scope rules allow you to include or exclude content from grouped information.

Authoritative Pages have an impact on how search results are calculated and presented. Up to three levels of authoritative levels can be used and search results are scored on their relation to the pages specified here. For example a search result that is listed on a page shown as authoritative will appears higher in search results than others.

Search Usage Reports
Gives a dashboard style overview of the queries received by the configured search service and the search results reported to the user. The various views can be exported to Excel or Acrobat.