Chapter 9
Search Scopes for Site Collection Administrators
A search scope enables you to allow your site collection users to carry out highly targeted searches within their site collections. However, such a search is limited to a subset of content defined as its scope, rather than encompassing the entire SharePoint index. For example, you can set up a search scope that looks only for Microsoft Word documents from among hundreds of different file types. In this case, the scope is defined as Word documents as opposed to the entire index.
Another example of when you can use scopes is where Sites use content categories to classify documents according to subject. Search scopes can help to narrow down search criteria and results to documents in a particular category or file type. Many users simply want see results that do not include information they are not particularly interested, and anything you can do to help reduce the number of results that they have to trawl through can be helpful and make your sites much more user friendly and efficient.
Creating a New Scope
A search scope can be applied at the site collection level or set by a SharePoint administrator in Central Administration for the Search Service Application. If the scope is created in Central Administration, it is available in every site collection for the web application. If set at the site collection level, it is available only in that specific site collection. Setting a custom scope is a two-stage process. In stage ...
