setup the search in sharepoint

Question

Hi everyone, for some reason my serach in the sharepoint site does not work, I have set up the SSP, the scopes, the crawls, everything but it still does not work, can someone explai nto me how to setup the search, maybe I did something wrong in the process.

Answer 1

It's not the simplest thing in the world to setup, as it's comprised of a number of components.
You need to check each one to determine where your problem is.
Start from the crawl, and work your way forward to the search production on the page.

So check the following:

• Check some servers have been setup to index pages. (You can see this under services on servers in the central administration pages.)
  Make sure they're all running correctly. (Not in a half started state.)
• Check your crawl log in your SSP to see if it is indexing anything.
  (Index different types of content, like file shares, web sites, and sharepoint itself. (check each one.)).
  (Note you need a special plugin to index PDF's.).
• Check your index is copied to the front end server where it is used.
  If it's not, it may be because this hasn't been configured, (Check Services running on servers again)
• Then check your site collection setup, and ensure you have a search site configured.
• Ensure the site collection search details are configured to use the search site.
• Finally check the user doing the searching actually has access to the content being indexed.

Doing all of that should give you some idea of where the problem is.

Answer 2

In addition to Bravax's anser its worth checking that you are not getting stung by the local loopback check.