MOSS Crawling iFrames

miketag — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 08:39:00 GMT

I have heard this question few times and I wanted to share my thoughts on it. The two questions are: Is there anything special that MOSS does to crawl pages with iFrames in them? Or do we have to do anything special to get MOSS to crawl these pages?

The answer to both questions are not really. MOSS crawler simply does an HTTP GET against the URL it is pointed to. It takes the response and indexes all the content in the response using an IFilter. So in this case, the crawler would be able to index all the iFrame children as part of the containing document. Children being the source that the iFrame is pointing to such as iFrame SRC="URL"’. There is no special configuration needed to enable this.

Hope that helps
Mike

Finding out the Crawl Status of a piece of content in MOSS Search

miketag — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:10:00 GMT

There is a great feature in MOSS Search that some folks may not know about. This is regarding finding out the status of an item in MOSS Search. For example, if you want to know if a site, a document or a link was crawled or not by MOSS Search, we have the feature called Crawl Logs.

From the SharePoint Central Administration site, go to the SSP site. Click on Search Settings under Search, and then Crawl Logs. Before you go any deeper, there is a text box that allows you to enter any URLs that begin with the hostname/path that you want to enter, and it will give you the crawled status. See first screen shot below. However, this gets much more interesting, detailed and useful if you go deeper.

Now click on any Host Name you have there under Crawled Content Status. Here you can find out the status of any item. You can filter on time/date, Content Sources, Status Type (Success, Warning or Error) and other criteria. This page tracks information about the status of crawled content in MOSS and can be very useful when you are trying to figure out if your content was crawled. See second screen shot below.

For more info on this great feature, see the MOSS SDK.

Mike Taghizadeh's Blog : Crawl

MOSS Crawling iFrames

Finding out the Crawl Status of a piece of content in MOSS Search