SharePoint 2010 : Deploying the Search Center - Redirecting the Search Box to the Search Center, Web Part Deployment

1. Redirecting the Search Box to the Search Center

After the search center has been deployed, it will be possible to make searches from the center's search page, modify preferences, and perform advanced searches from the Advanced Search page. However, the main search box that appears on all pages will still point to OSSSearchResults.aspx. So you'll need to direct these queries to the search center you have created. For multiple site collections that share a single search center, redirecting this search box to the shared search center can be extremely useful.

To modify the target of the search box, follow these steps and refer to Figure 1.

1. Navigate to the top level of the site collections.
2. Choose Site Actions, Site Settings.
3. Under Site Collection Administration, choose Search Settings.
4. In the Site Collection Search Result page field, define your new search results page. If you named your Basic Search Center “Search”, this path will be /Search/results.aspx. If you created an Enterprise Search Center and named it “Search”, the path will be /Search/Pages/results.aspx.

Figure 1. Changing the search box target

These are the basic steps necessary for deploying a search center to SharePoint 2010. Using one of the built-in search centers is the quickest way to get a feature-rich, customizable search user interface. However, as previously mentioned, search does work out of the box and many organizations can get by using the default OSSSearchResults.aspx results page. For others, even the search centers are not enough or perhaps not flexible enough. This will require them to create their own Web Part pages and deploy the search Web Parts individually to them—or perhaps deploy them to other site pages or even create their own Web Parts .

2. Web Part Deployment

It is possible to deploy search on your SharePoint 2010 installation without actually deploying a search center. Both search and result Web Parts can be added to normal pages without using the built-in templates. The method of deploying the search Web Parts is the same as deploying any other Web Part on SharePoint 2010. In fact, all the functionality of the Basic and Enterprise Search Centers can be recreated by building a site with the search Web Parts. However, this is a lengthy task, and most if not all of the search functionality necessary for most organizations is available on the search centers. Therefore, unless extremely custom search usage is required, it is recommended to use the built-in templates and deploy a search center.

Adding Web Parts

To add Web Parts to an existing page, do the following:

1. Choose Edit Page under Site Actions while logged in as a site administrator.
2. Select Editing Tools and Insert.
3. Click Web Part.
4. Choose the Search category and the search Web Part you want to add (Figure 2).
5. Save and close the editor under the page menu in the ribbon.

Figure 2. Adding search Web Parts

After the Web Parts are added to the page, the target of the search box can be added by editing the Web Part or customizations to the parts made. In Figure 3, a search box and core results Web Part have been added to the home page of the default SharePoint site.

Figure 3. A crude example of adding search Web Parts to a page

A better example of when to add the search Web Parts to a non-search page would be for displaying a diverse set of documents or pages in a single list regardless of their location in SharePoint. This could be a list of the latest ten documents that have a given term in them or documents by a specific author. Using the result Web Part alone on a Web Part page and setting a fixed query for that Web Part can allow this information to be displayed anywhere on the site that the administrator deems useful.