Wednesday 8 July 2009

Fix - SharePoint 2007 Search Scopes not Displaying In Search Scope Dropdown after Deleting and Recreating the Shared Services Provider

To fix an issue with the Crawler mentioned in my previous blog article at
http://ddkonline.blogspot.com/2009/07/fix-when-sharepoint-2007-search-index.html
, I was forced to create a new Shared Services Provider. Everything seemed to work fine apart from the fact that I later noticed that the search scopes dropdown was just showing a single record, when it was previously showing 3 items (This Site, and the Shared Scopes "All Sites", and "All People"

The Problem

Only one search scope is showing in the dropdown (ie "This Site:SITENAME"), or This Site: Home in the example.



This problem has been encountered by others as well:
http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2006/10/19/moss-search-scopes-missing-in-action.aspx

Found out by comparing to our UAT environment (which did not have the Permanent Crawling issue), that the main difference was that the Display Group for my Search scopes was a name I made up called "Shared", and then moved them from the "Unused" display group to my new "Shared Group".

The Solution:

The trick is that the Search scopes will only show in the search dropdown if the Display group is named "Search Dropdown". Once this is updated, it will magically show up in the list.

On a side note, this is a very clunky and obscure/non-intuitive mechanism for the population of the search dropdown. I would much prefer that it be an explcit flag on the Display group of "Display In Search Dropdown". This would make it much clearer for everyone.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

This doesnt seem to be my solution as my test and prod farms had this setting (in fact, exact same setting as a default), but the test farm shows all three scopes in the dropdown, prod only shows "this site".

Anonymous said...

Sorry, 1 minute later I found the solution. Goto Site Settings - Search Settings - and enable the "Custom Source". For some reason that was set in the test farm but not prod. I have a publishing site at the top level FYI.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for this post. I have been tearing my hair out for two weeks trying to get my site to recognize the custom scopes. This is an easy fix, but yes, some kind of flag would have been so much easier. Thanks again!!

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Jordan London said...

I've got an interesting issue; not only do my scopes not show up but I get no search results. Let me clarify; this is MOSS and when searching from the main page of the portal site it returns lots of results, even results from the many WSS sites under the portal. This is good. However, when searching from within the WSS sites themselves nothing comes back. I don't really care that custom scopes don't show up in the WSS site collections I just need to get search working at that level. Thanks!

Jordan London said...

Got results! I had a mismatch between the AAM default zone and content source start address (as discussed here)

vapcguy said...

How come I don't have a "Create Display Group" option in my "View Scopes" page? I have MOSS 2007.

vapcguy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
vapcguy said...

Never mind, figured it out. There's a "View Scopes" in the SSP page where I was looking, but there's also a "View Scopes" you can get to from Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify All Site Settings and going under Site Collection Administration and clicking "Search scopes". Also saw a "Search settings" link there where everyone was saying to turn on custom scopes (mine were already enabled), but was confused because there's also a "Search Settings" in the SSP pages, where there is no radio button for this task. People need to be specific about where to go!!!!!!!!!!!!

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