SharePoint® 2010 Administration: Instant Reference

Configure Federated Search

One of the challenges with searching in large organizations is that many times there are multiple SharePoint farms in distributed geographic locations. In previous versions of SharePoint, farm administrators had to configure cross-farm crawls, which were both time-consuming and resource-intensive on the servers. SharePoint 2010 incorporates a feature called Federated Search, which allows a search page to query additional data sources beyond the local SharePoint Search Service. This feature makes use of the open standard OpenSearch 1.1 to query any compliant search server and retrieve results for the same keyword or phrase that has been entered on the search page. This not only eliminates the need for cross-farm crawling ...