Search returning no results after moving to new server

Question

We moved to a new server a few months back and everything seemed to be working fine. But just today someone flagged up that searches never return any results. Everything was fine before switching to the new server and I can only assume that the configuration of the new server is the problem.

However, a problem is that the server admin who setup the new Sharepoint server is no longer with our company and I have been left in charge of it. I know next to nothing about the setup of the server and have been reading various web pages and I am getting lost in all the jargon. Some mention SSP, which I don't seem to have access too. Some suggest installing IFilters. Some have mentioned Office Server Web Services web site on the application server, this is not on our Sharepoint server.

Is there a definitive guide to what should be done in this case? Is there not an easy way to setup the search? I don't need it to search the documents for the specific terms, just the web pages that are there.

Any help appreciated, if you need any more information I can provide whatever you need.

EDIT: As mentioned below:

I have checked the site collection and I am an admin, along with the guy that left the company. I cannot access the Search admin page though. I have searched the internet and found that it would be located at http://localhost:<port>/ssp/admin/searchadministration.aspx though and there doesn't appear to anything there. The SSP is not installed/available.

EDIT 2:

Doing a bit more research on this and it seems that we don't have MOSS installed in the server, it seems to just be WSS. Does this mean that searching the site is impossible?! I wouldn't have thought so.

Answer 1

Since you have mentioned this as a SharePoint 2007 issue, I can suggest you to look up on few things,

1. Check whether the default SSP in the central admin site is running. If you dont have access, go to the particular site collection and add yourself as a site collection admin from central admin itself and get access.
2. If you reach the Search admin page now, check whether the index server, default content access account are running fine. Also check whether there is any crawling being done previously.
3. Check for content sources and crawl the whole site and if everything goes well your search might start giving results.

But there can be numerous problems that might be stopping from Search to work, but unless you follow the steps and go 1 by 1 and report the exact place where you are failing, you wont be able to find a solution and it might be difficult to help.

Good Luck ...