Crawler architecture in SharePoint 2007

Bill English has written a nice article about the architecture of crawler in SharePoint 2007.
Here is the link: http://admincompanion.mindsharp.com/BillBlog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=83

Search results not generated even when contents are indexed

Background:
Search is configured on the MOSS Server and contents are indexed properly.
However no results are generated when user tried to find the data that exists on the site.

The users are using the URL http://sharepoint.domain.com/ to access the site at http://servername/

Cause:
Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) settings are not set properly.

Resolution:

1. Add http://sharepoint.domain.com/ URL in the default zone
2. Add http://servername/ in the intranet zone
3. Re-run the crawl

The results will be displayed to the users now.

Newly added scopes at SSP level don’t show up in Search Scope dropdown

Ok, when you add a scope on SSP level it doesn't show up in the Search scope drop-down for the sites.
This is because SharePoint gives us great flexibility and control over the search features. So any new scope that we add at SSP level will be available to all the site collections (as unused scope) but it needs to be enabled.

Steps to do this:

1. Open the root site in the Site collection and open the Site Administration page (Site Actions --> Site Settings)
2. Click the 'Search scopes' under 'Site Collection Administration'
3. The newly added scop is listed under the 'Unused Scopes' group
   To make it available in the search scope dropdown for the site collection we need to make this scope available
   

4. Click/Edit 'Display Group: Search dropdown' scope group
5. Check the 'Display' checkbox for the scope you added at SSP and click OK
   

6. Repeat these steps for 'Display Group: Advanced Search dropdown' scope group if required

Now the newly added scope will be visible in the search scope dropdown on the site collection.

You can also remove certain scopes from the search dropdown by unchecking the 'display' box. If you do not want to make a scope available to the site collection, make sure to remove it from all the display scope groups viz. Search dropdown and Advanced Search dropdown.

"All Sites" scope not available in the site collection

Today I was experimenting with the Enterprise Search feature in MOSS. Doing the practical was long due.

So the first thing I noticed on my test site was that the 'All Sites' scope was not available in the Search scopes in my site collection. 'All Sites' and 'People' are the two default scopes added by SharePoint when we enable the Search service.

So I was wondering why it didn't show up in the search scope dropdown

The reason and solution is explained very nicely by Brijesh here
Steps 8 and 9 (enable publishing features) were not required though when I tried it.

Point To Remember: When creating a top-level site in any site collection, use a site template under Publishing templates group. This has two benefits:

1. The default search scopes will be available by default.
2. The dropdown for top-link bar will be easier to setup and control (How to enable drop down menus for top-link bar?)
3. I'll update this list as I find more advantages