Okay let me start this blogpost with a customary ritual of saying, “SharePoint” = WSS + MOSS, so this post applies to both.

But search behaves differently between MOSS & WSS. The biggest difference is, WSS will search within its site collection, i.e. it can’t crawl the entire farm for you with different URLs. MOSS on the other hand can accept search rules and can be pointed to crawl, say a BDC, network location, your company website, your blog – whatever the heck you want.

Differences aside, here is how you setup searchin’ in SharePoint 2007.

1.  After you have installed SharePoint, go under Operations, and Services on the Server.

2.  Under there, start up Office SharePoint Server Search. (Getting an error when you start this?)

3.  Next, setup Shared Services for that farm.

4. Go to the Shared Services Administration website, and under there go to “Search Settings” under “Search”.

5. Under Search Settings -> Manage Content sources and Crawl Schedules. You should see a “Local Office SharePoint Server sites” setup for ya. You’d think this would do it – but no.

6. Click on that link and setup a schedule for “Full Crawl” and “Incremental Crawl”. If you want – start up a full crawl after you are done setting up this schedule.

7. You can specify other search engine criterion here – URLs to exclude in search results, various rules on following links/domains etc., the content access account (make sure this isn’t administrator – and you would have set this up anyway when you setup SharePoint server search in item #2), file types etc.

That’s it. Your search is ready to rock’n’roll. Go to your site – issue a search; should work now. J