As I’m drafting the Vision/Scope document for the SharePointPedia (more info on this very soon), one of the key functional requirements that I’ve specified is the ability to do a unified search of SharePoint centric information sources on the Web. I had envisioned a MOSS-based solution with a heavily customized Search facility and plenty of disk space to store the search index for the corpus of content that would be indexed. By pure coincidence, I just learned about the search macro feature that Windows Live Search has had for a few months now, which may provide a very easy to implement solution for the problem. With this feature, I was able to quickly create a custom search page at http://search.live.com/macros/lliu/spsearch whose search results are restricted to a predefined list of websites. Doing a search for “BDC” quickly reveals the benefits of using a constrained search scope vs. the wide open scope of Live Search or Google search for the same keyword.

   I will add many other URLs to the SharePoint Community Search macro definition over the next few weeks, so I hope that the custom Live Search service will be able to handle 100+ sites for a constrained search scope. In the meantime, I encourage you to give this custom search page a try as well as to create your own Live Search macros. And if you’re using IE7, you can easily (with one click) add the SharePoint Community Search as a search provider for the browser’s search box.

   Again, the new unified SharePoint Community Search page is at http://search.live.com/macros/lliu/spsearch.

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