Ignore flag for certain files in custom search?

Question

I have requirements to be able to mark certain documents as obsolete so that they don't appear in search results. Is this a possibility?

For a Document Library I would just have a field set to either Yes/No.

Answer 1

Don't you want the items to be indexed, or not to be returned in a certain search scope?

If you just want to ixclude results in a search query, do the following:

• Find your sitecolumn in the crawled properties overview.
• Map your crawled property to a metadata property, make sure it can be queried
• Create a custom scope, which will be used for your search query.
• Add a new rule:
• Property Query with: Managed_Property = False (or yes or 1, not sure about that)
• make sure to exclude those items.

When this scope is used, all the documents that contain that value are excluded. If you want to explicitly include documents, set your managed_property = true and make sure to require the results in that case. Only documents with property=true, are returned then.

If you want to explicitly exclude documents from the index, use the search results removal. Add documents that may not be indexed one-by-one. But your administrator is not gonna like it.

Aside from that: did you know that the results of the queries that you run, are security trimmed (For SharePoint, that is). If you don't have readpermissions on documents, the results won't appear in search.

Answer 2

This can be done via "Search result removal"

Type the URLs you want to remove from search results. These URLs will be removed from search results immediately. Crawl rules will be created to exclude the specified URLs from future crawls. To undo this action, delete the crawl rule and start a full crawl of the content source with which this URL was crawled.

You can do this in the Search Administration of you SSP. (http://YourServer/ssp/admin/_layouts/searchresultremoval.aspx)