Advanced Search in Sharepoint 2007

Recently I’ve been working on a deployment of an enterprise sharepoint portal for a friend of mine and building it from the ground up utilizing all there is available in sharepoint we got to the point where the next step was search functionality.   There is a lot of documentation out there regarding how to setup search and I think i’ll just make a video for that later on however I wanted to touch on a topic of how to utilize search after it’s actually setup.

You might notice your sharepoint portal site is default searching ‘This Site:’ and that doesn’t exactly work out the way it should, seems like it searches nothing at all.

An easy fix in doing so, first backup a  copy of SearchArea.xml to SearchArea.xml.bak for example, it’s located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\OSearchEnhancedFeature\

Then edit the file and make the following changes

Change UseSiteDefaults from True to False
Right above this entry add DropDownMode and set the value to ShowDD

Happy Searching!!