Scopes in MOSS Search

In this post, I am going to discuss about how to create search scopes and limit search results to that scope.

To create a new Search Scope navigate to your Shared Service Provider web site and click on Search Settings. Scroll down and you will see the Search Scopes section. Click on "View Scopes" and click "New Scope" at the top.

Here we will create a new Scope and call it Team Tasks. We'll use the default results page.

From here we can add rules that will define our Scope. In my case I want the scope to be limited to a specific list so I choose web address and in the folder section I paste the URL of my list, excluding any aspx pages. I choose to Include any item that meets this criteria, i.e. any item that is in this list. Click "Ok" and that is it.

Your new Scope will be ready for use once it is complied which usually happens every 15 minutes or so. You can force the compile by going to Search Setting and clicking "Update Now" under the Search Scopes section. Now the question is how you use it.

To use your newly created Search Scope navigate to the Top Level Site Settings and click on "Search Scopes" under "Site Collection Administration".

From there you can see that your new scope is listed under the "Unused Scopes" section. We need to move it to the "Advanced Search" display group. Do this by clicking on that group name and enable it by clicking its check box.

You can now see that the Scope is in the right grouping.

The final step here is to enable the Scopes section of our Advanced Search page. The results are as follows: