How to edit display of search results in SharePoint 2010?

Question

I am running a pretty standard SharePoint 2010 intranet site whose primary functionality is to act as a central repository for documents. When I search for an item on the site, each individual result contains the following (in order):

1. Header within document
2. A portion of the document highlighting where the search terms are found
3. Author, Date, Size
4. URL of document/item

After some initial testing, the project sponsors want the following changes to the search results:

• Remove the Author, Date, Size and URL information
• Instead of displaying the header within the document, they want the document Title to be displayed

Resulting in the following:

1. Title of document
2. A portion of the document highlighting where the search terms are found

How would I go about making these changes to the search results? I am using the default search contained in the global navigation so far and have not done much to search beyond configuring the scope/crawling settings. Is there a better way to be implementing search than what I have done so far?

Answer 1

You need to edit the XSLT that is used to transform the search results.

You can either do this by editing the in-line XSLT in the search results web part (in the edit part of the web part), or you can export the web part and configure it to use the XSLT files found in http:///Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/

Here you will find ItemStyle.xsl, Header.xsl and others.

Read this guide on MSDN on how to proceed. More about customizing search results here