Federate sp2010 search to WSS?

Question

I have a preexisting WSS 3.0 site in production currently. As I stand up a SP2010 instance, search will help bridge the gap during the interim while things are migrated.

The search center on the 2010 farm will show results for both sites, but is there any way to configure the WSS search box to return results from the 2010 index?

Answer 1

I see two solutions to this question:

1. You will need a search box that redirects users to the SP2010 search center. But with WSS 3.0 it is not possible to configure a search center url for the built-in search box. This is only possible with the search box included in SP2007 Server and Search Server 2008. But it is possible to replace the search box with a custom one that redirects user queries to the SP2010 search center. MSDN has a good article on replacing the small search box on WSS 3.0 site pages.

2. Federating results from SP2010 to WSS 3.0 is not possible as it does not include any of the Enterprise search components. But with Search Server 2008 it is possible as this version of SharePoint is essentially WSS 3.0 + Enterprise Search. You could therefore consider upgrading your WSS 3.0 deployment to Search Server 2008. This is supported and documented on Technet.