SharePoint 2010: Custom Search page not returning expected results for some users

Question

Our site collection has two distinct search pages:

A) http://mysite/search/results.aspx 
B) http://mysite/search/sitepages/reports.aspx

Search "A" is the standard search functionality that was included with the site collection when it was created, and works correctly (all expected results are returned for all users). Search "B" however:

• Uses a scope designed to return only "ContentType = Report", so that it should only return a specific collection of documents stored in a document library
• Has customised XSL to control the appearance of the results

The search works perfectly fine for search "A", but for search "B" we have some problems. Specifically:

• For a particular subset of users (including farm admin and site collection admins), search "B" returns all expected results (i.e. the same as search "A").
• However, some users aren't getting any results - including users who are granted permissions to the relevant document libraries as part of the NT AUTHORITY/AUTHENTICATED USERS group.
• When I set the logging of the Search component in the ULS logs to Verbose, I can see that the expected documents are being security trimmed (i.e. "Security trimming docid ####"). This is despite the user having explicit permission to view/read/open the documents in the searched library.

I am not sure where to go from here. Thanks for any assistance you can provide!

Answer 1

I found out that the documents I was trying to retrieve in the Search (i.e. Excel documents) would only be returned for users who had the "Open Items – View the source of documents with server-side file handlers" permission enabled. Once I added this permission to our group containing NT AUTHORITY/AUTHENTICATED USERS (and ran another incremental crawl), the search started returning results.