Set up a search center and:
1. Configure what content you would like to search (examples may be the local intranet, a federated search, etc.)
2. Crawl the content: This service will process the content with any related metadata and store them as managed properties in the search index. In SharePoint 2013, the crawler can be set to do continuous crawls. [What this really means is that when a continuous crawl is activated, by default an incremental crawl is started every 15 minutes and will run in parallel with the existing crawls. So unlike SharePoint 2010 where only one incremental crawl had to finish before a new one could start, by using Continuous Crawl in SharePoint 2013, the index is kept much fresher].
3. Search: Queries from the search page will be sent to the index database
4. Results: Results from the queries will be displayed in the search results page.
A schematic of Search is shown above. The index stores the list and meta data for the content crawled and this is where the search query is directed too. So instead of searching all the content, search queries only look at the index and return results to the user in a short time.
Future Blog posts will include:
- How to refine search results
- How to setup Federated Search
