SharePoint 2007 - Things to Check When People Search Doesn't Work

There are a few basic things to check when People Search in SharePoint 2007 does not return as many results as expected:

1. Make sure the User Profile Connection is valid. One issue which I've encountered is when the domain name is auto-detected incorrectly by SharePoint and so attempts to crawl users within an invalid domain. For example, my client's domain name is LOCATION.COMPANYNAME.LOCAL. SharePoint detected the domain name as "LOCATION", but the real NETBIOS domain name was "LOCATIONCOMPANYNAME". You can double check this by going to Shared Services Administration ->SharedServices1 > User Profile and Properties > Manage Connections and try to make a new connection. If the auto-discover is invalid, it will run validation and show the following error:
   
   
2. Even when the User Profile Crawl takes place, search results will only show when the The Search Crawl has to run on the crawled user profiles. In addition, you will need to confirm that under Search settings > Content Sources that the content sources are in fact correctly set up. In particular, click "Edit Content Source" from the Content Sources list and look under the "Start Addresses" section. For people search to work, it should list at least one entry with the "sps3" pseudo-protocol. e.g you should have at least one entry such as:
   sps3://servername. Otherwise, search will not crawl any User Profiles.