How do you set up a search box webpart that use a search results page on another site?

Question

I have a main intranet site:

http://sharepoint/

I have a subsite that's the search portal for the entire company:

http://sharepoint/search/

On the main site, I've set up a webpart that points to the results page of the search site, so that there's a box people can see when they first hit the main page. The Target Search Results Page URL I've set to /search/Pages/results.aspx. When I enter a search term (we'll use Ryan as an example), it takes me to the results page on the search site just as I expect, but there are no results.

Looking at the url, you would expect the results page to be:

• http://sharepoint/search/Pages/results.aspx?k=Ryan

It's actually:

• http://sharepoint/search/Pages/results.aspx?k=Ryan&cs=This%20Site&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsharepoint

The extra text in the URL is the site that it came from, and is breaking the URL and thus the results page, causing no results to be returned. If I remove that text, it works fine.

What is the correct way to set up a search box on one site that displays the results of another site?

Answer 1

Make sure that your search scopes are configured and accessible, as of right now it is not pointing to your All Sites scope. You can check that by going to the Site Settings, and reviewing the Search Settings and Search Scopes pages.