Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

162 Part III: Planning and Deployment
Search Scopes
A search scope is a list of one or more source groups, in combination with any specified
areas and topics located on the portal site on which they are defined. Search
scopes allow users to narrow their searches based on the topics, areas, and content
sources of items on the portal site.
Search scopes can be limited by topics and areas, or by groups of content
sources. Source groups outside the portal site can be grouped, and you can limit
your search scope to exclude or include particular source groups.
Search scopes are defined by a portal site administrator and are exposed only
to the portal site on which they are created. For example, a search scope created on
the Human Resources portal site named “this portal site” might consist of a source
group containing content sources that define all content on the HR file server. This
scope would be available only on the HR portal site.
Note You can use search scopes from remote portal sites to give your overall
search scope taxonomy consistency throughout the portal sites in your
organization. This is an advanced topic that is covered in Chapter 22, “Managing
External Content in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003.”
Search scopes appear to all users in a drop-down list next to the portal site
search box. These search scopes are typically limited to specific topics and source
groups that are important and common enough to make them useful to users in the
organization as a separate searchable scope.
Planning Content Indexes
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 comes with two content indexes. You can create as
many as you need. However, keep in mind that each search query has to be run on
each index and the results aggregated before they are returned to the user. The
result is that the more indexes you have, the longer search results take to generate.
Also, the more index files you have, the greater the possibility is that ranking in the
result set will be skewed. This is because that ranking is determined on a per-index
file basis and there is no support for single-set ranking when the result set is generated
from multiple index files. The advantages of having more (and thus smaller)
index files is that propagation between an Index and Search server in a server farm
scenario is much faster than copying a few very large index files from the Index to
the Search server.