Search administrators can improve the relevance and presentation of search results by carefully planning the end-user search experience. The goal of such planning is to create a search experience that enables users to quickly find the information they need. This article contains information that can help Shared Services Provider (SSP) administrators and site collection administrators optimize the end-user search experience.
The first section of this article discusses:
-
The search user interface for performing search queries.
-
How to plan for custom scopes. This includes information about the default scopes that users use to filter the content included in each search query. Administrators can use this information to help identify when your organization might need to create custom scopes. This subsection also discusses how to plan any necessary custom scopes.
-
Advanced searches and how properties can be used to filter search results. Administrators can use this information to understand the options they have for managing keywords and properties to optimize users' ability to perform powerful advanced searches.
-
The benefit of using property searches with scopes. This includes how crawled properties relate to managed properties and how to plan for them.
The second section of this article covers search results pages and the features that administrators can control that affect what users see in search results. The section discusses:
-
How to plan for keywords and best bets. This includes how to plan for effective keywords, best bets for a particular organization and how associating synonyms with keywords can enhance the end-user experience.
-
How administrators can control the relevance ranking of particular sites to improve the relevance of search results.
-
Describes the new federated locations feature that can be used to search multiple sources and combine results into a single search results page. This feature requires the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers. For more information, see Install the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (Office SharePoint Server 2007).
-
How to control how links appear in search results.
-
How to plan for search-based alerts.
The abilities described in this article enable administrators to have a great deal of control of the end-user search experience. Although we recommend that you constantly evaluate the effectiveness of search queries during regular operations, good planning before the initial deployment can help create effective search queries from the start and reduce future administration costs.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263089.aspx