Configuring Federated Search for SharePoint 2010

In this post I will discuss how to leverage external search engines which supports OpenSearch protocol and display their results in SharePoint environment.

SharePoint 2010 provides 2 ways to search external data sources. The “content crawling”, in this approach the text context and attributes are indexed and stored by SharePoint search server and the “federated search”, the topic of this post. In this approach SharePoint passes search term and other parameters to external search engine and formats/displays the returned results.
The Federated Search approach provides following benefits :

1. No need for additional storage, as SharePoint does not index the external content.
2. We can use external system's native search capabilities.

Federated Result Web Parts:

Federated Results Web Part:

This displays result from specific federated search location. You can only specify one search location per web part.

Top Federated Results Web Part:

You can configure multiple federated search locations with priority and the web part returns result from first federated location which returns search result.
To configure new federated location, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your SharePoint Central Administration site as a SharePoint farm administrator.
2. Click "Manage service applications" under the "Application Management" heading.
3. Click "Search Service Application".
4. Click "Federated Locations" under the "Queries and Results" heading in the left-hand navigation panel.
5. Click "New Location".
6. Fill in the information for the new federated location, and then click 'OK'.

Here are some guidelines on the important fields:

Location Type:

Search Index on this Server: The search happens locally and can be customized to return result from specific scope.

OpenSearch 1.0/1.1: This setting uses external search engine which receives and processes parameter from SharePoint and return structured XML result like RSS or Atom.

Query Template:

The URL template called by SharePoint with search term and other configured tokens. At runtime the tokens are replaced by actual values before calling the URL . The URL should return structured XML like RSS or Atom feed.

http://<server url>/_layouts/CCESearchSF/SearchSF.aspx?q={searchTerms}&start={startItem}&count=3&format=rss

Supported Token	Description
{searchTerms}	Replaced with search term user types in search box
{startIndex}	When fetching results in pages, this token replaced with start index of the first result.
{startPage}	When fetching results in pages, this token replaced with page number of set of results to return.
{count}	Replaced with number of results to display per page.

More Results Link Template:

The html template contains link to external system search result page.

Triggers:

Always: The search query is always forwarded to federated location.

Prefix: A prefix contains specific term which must be prefixed with search term. eg: "office" prefix with search query like "office New York" will match and "New York" search term is sent to federated location.

Pattern: A regular expression pattern must match the search term to trigger the query to be forwarded to federated location.

Display transformations:

The default transformation provided by SharePoint is good enough in most cases and can be left to default values. But if you prefer to customize the result output, you can replace the default XSLT with your customized XSLT.

Restrictions:

The use of federated location can be un-restricted or restricted to few specific sites or domain.

Authentications:

Anonymous: The federated location does not require authentication.

Common: Every connection uses the same set of credentials to connect to federated location.

Per-User: The credentials of the user who initiated the query is used to connect to federated location. If using Per-user authentication type and the resource is located on different machine, make sure to select "Kerberos" as authentication type.

Hope this helps.

-Javed