How do I search for people by birthday?

Question

SharePoint 2007 has a problem finding people by birthday.

If you view a person's profile (their "My Site") and click on their birthday, you're taken to a People Search for a term like this:

Birthday:"22 March"

However, that never returns any results. If you amend the search term to:

Birthday:"22 March 2000"

... then the person appears in the search results (as well as anyone else with March 22 as a birthday).

It seems that the "Date No Year" data type is stored internally as a traditional date with a year of 2000, and the crawler isn't smart enough to ignore that, so birthday searches always fail.

Is this fixed in SharePoint 2010?

Answer 1

Unfortunately 2010 behaves the same way. There is no "clean" way to handle this, but it is possible to write a scheduled job or timer job that could set the value of a hidden user profile field with day and month only which could then support a search query.