Where did my Search Scopes list on the home page go in SharePoint 2010?

Posted Monday, August 2, 2010 11:45 AM by CoreyRoth

On a recent SharePoint 2010 migration I completed, this was one of the first questions I was asked.  After seeing versions of SharePoint all these months, it never occurred to me that the dropdown list wasn’t there any more until someone pointed it out.

HomePageSearchBox

Luckily, it’s easy enough to change this and I found some new settings along the way.  This box uses the built-in (not supposed to be customized) OSSSearchResults.aspx.  However, to use scopes, we need to create a Search Center.  To do this, we can go to Site Settings –> Search Settings to make some configuration changes.  This page was here in 2007, but I was pleased to see some new settings here in 2010 that I had not noticed yet.  We set the path to our search center just as we did before by specifying the Pages library of the search center.

SiteCollectionSearchSettings1

There is a new setting to specify what the site collection search dropdown displays. Now there is a boat load of options for you to pick from.  The default is Do not show scopes dropdown, and default to contextual scope.  Here are all of the options you have to pick from.

SiteCollectionSearchSettings2

The options are fairly self-explanatory with maybe the exception of default to ‘s’ URL parameter.  I’ve talked about this in previous posts, but what this does is tells the drop down list to default to the scope that was passed via the ‘s’ query string parameter.   This means that when you perform a search and are looking at the results page, the drop down will show the scope you just searched for.  As for default to contextual scope, this refers to the This Site or This List search options that you might be used to seeing from SharePoint 2007.  What option you pick here is largely up to you.  I usually end up going with Show and default to contextual scope.  However, I think Show, do not include contextual scopes, and default to ‘s’ URL parameter can also be a good choice at times.

We have one more setting that I want to mention on this page called Site Collection Search Results Page.  This allows you to override the URL used by contextual search.  In SharePoint 2007, all contextual searches went to the application page /_layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx.  If you ever wanted to customize this page, you had to modify a built-in page which of course is unsupported.  Another side effect was that it changed the look of that page on every site on that server.  This new setting is great because it means we can change the contextual search page on a per site collection basis and simply upload a new application page without affecting the original page.

SiteCollectionSearchSettings3

To configure what scopes show up in the dropdown on the home page, you need to modify the Search Dropdown scope display group.  Modify this group as you see fit and then you should see it on the home page.  In this case, I added my file share scope to be displayed on all of my pages.

ScopeDisplayGroupHomePage

This is what my pages look like with the dropdown.

HomePageSearchBox2

So I can kind of see why they changed the default option for this.  The interface just looks cleaner without the dropdown box.  However, I think a lot of users are used to seeing it there, so this shows you how to add it back in the event that you ever need to.

Comments

# re: Where did my Search Scopes list on the home page go in SharePoint 2010?

Wednesday, August 11, 2010 5:25 AM by prathima

Hello Corey,

Thanx for you article.

i have a requirement where i have to search data across multiple site collections. so thought of creating search scopes.but am facing an issue when defining the search scope for different site collections in our site. it is not showing any item count.

its working fine in my local environment but failed in production.

Do in need to activate any features?

Pls tell me what would be the issue.

# re: Where did my Search Scopes list on the home page go in SharePoint 2010?

Wednesday, August 11, 2010 9:22 AM by CoreyRoth

@prathima How are you defining each scope? by using a URL to each site?  Do search results work normally if you don't use any scope?  If you are using alternate access mappings on your server then you may need to change the URL that you specify in the scope.

# re: Where did my Search Scopes list on the home page go in SharePoint 2010?

Monday, April 16, 2012 9:39 AM by Drew

THANK YOU!!!!  I was able to make some wonderful progress today thanks to this article!  I am so thankful for people like you who take the time to put this content out on the internet!  :) :) :)

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