SharePoint introduces features to support both formal corporate search using the Search Center enterprise site template as well as informal ad hoc search at the site and site collection level.
Maintaining a productive search environment is a process that requires ongoing maintenance and ownership of responsibilities.
In Central Administration you can view search reports that display most used queries, keywords and a host of other important search details. These reports should be reviewed on a regular basis to facilitate accurate result sets, maintenance and addition of keywords, tweaking relevance settings, search scopes and taxonomy.
Search results should be reviewed often and used to help with decisions surrounding relevancy settings in Central Administration. Certain results may need to be promoted to the top of the result set while others demoted.
Using the Shared Service Provider administration pages one can configure server name mappings to “clean up” the returned search results displayed to users. The mappings will allow the display of a friendly server name in URLs instead of the fully qualified server name.
This search journey will include effectively managing:
- Content Sources
- Shared Search Scopes
- Site Search Scopes
- Keywords
- Best bets
- Relevancy Rankings
- Result Sets
- Backups
- Crawls
- Server Mappings
- User Experience
The process in addition to the ownership of the above tasks should be outlined in your SharePoint governance plan.
