I've blogged several times before about the 2 different search engines in SharePoint 2003. One search engine is used when you are on the main SharePoint Portal, while the other is used when you are on the Windows SharePoint Sites. This alone is frustrating, as users will get different results depending on where they are doing the search.
Yesterday a user discovered what appears to be a third search engine...
When you are on a Windows SharePoint Site (WSS), and you browse down to a Shared Document Library, and run a sech on that page, you get yet another set of results. From what I can tell, the idea behind this search is that it is focused just on what is in that Shared Document Library. Actually this works too if you browse to a specific list and run a search. That search will just be on that list's contents. That's fine if it was just a filtered version of the site search, but it appears to be yet another search engine. For instance, a site only has one Shared Document Library. If you run a search on the main site page, and then run the same search on the Shared Document Library page, you should expect the same results. Unfortunately you do not get the same results.
I looked around and could only find this:
http://www.codecomments.com/archive355-2005-8-520421.html
I followed the suggested quick fix, to just modify the templates so that the Shared Document Library page just runs the site search engine. This is somewhat frustrating as it is not a filtered search, but just an overall site search.
<div align=left>In
<code>web server extensions60TEMPLATE1033STSLISTSDOCLIBAllItems.aspx</code>
replace
<code><SharePoint:ViewSearchForm ID="L_SearchView" Prompt="Search this view" Go="Go" runat="server"/></code>
with
<code><SharePoint:ViewSearchForm ID="L_SearchView" Prompt="Search on this Site" Go="Start" Action="searchresults.aspx" runat="server"/></code></div>
A number of questions are still outstanding on this one:
1) Why?
2) Where is this search algorithm? Is it a stored procedure in SQL Server?
3) Is it possible to modify the algorithm to be the same as the site search, or focus the site search to just the document library when run from that page.
