How can I get the Search Box to honor the Search Settings?

Question

I have a custom search results page. In 5 environments across dev and QA we can use this Search Settings site collection administration page (_layouts/enhancedSearch.aspx) to specify:

• Do not use custom scopes
• Do not show scope dropdown, and default to contextual scope
• Our own custom site collection search results page

I actually set the site collection search results page using PowerShell (yes, it is really "TRAGET" in the property name):

$web.AllProperties["SRCH_TRAGET_RESULTS_PAGE"] = $searchResultsPage  
$web.Update()

Unfortunately, in our UAT environment this doesn't work. When viewing the Search Settings page, it all looks correct, but the scopes drop down shows and clicking on search takes the user to the OSSSearchResults.aspx page.

I have seen before where changing these settings can take several seconds to actually work, but this was done yesterday and we have just tested after doing an IISRESET to no avail.

Is there any additional trick to getting this to work? We created the site collection using our scripts and know that the masterpage is using the standard search box. This is SharePoint 2010 Standard if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

Follow these additional steps and change the target search results page:

1) Go to your search page and click Edit Page.

2) Right click Search Box web part and select Edit Web Part.

3) In the Panel, expand Miscellaneous and find "Target search results page URL" textbox and put your complete search page url.

4) Click Apply and then OK.

There's a "Site Collection Search Results Page" field which is used for configuring the search results page used for contextual searches (such as "This Site"). It can be found by doing the following:

1) Go to your SharePoint site collection.

2) Select "Site Settings" from the "Site Actions" menu

3)Go to the "Site Collection Administration" section and select "Search Settings" The field "Site Collection Search Results Page" will be listed on the bottom. The default value is

/_layouts/osssearchresults.aspx, change this to your custom search page url.

Let me know the results.

Answer 2

It turns out that this UAT environment is somewhat corrupt in that it has remnants of FAST even though this environment is not using FAST (I can get my Full Text SQL queries to work if I go directly to my custom search results page).

I didn't have access to the environment before and was sending emails back and forth with someone who did. However, in a screen share today I noticed that the site collection administration settings showed 3 FAST links and not the regular Search Settings links. My theory is that the Search Box web part is a FAST search box web part and we need to make sure the original search box web part is given a higher priority ("sequence" delegate control setting).

So, one answer is don't used a messed up environment that has remnants of FAST. To fix our environment we simply had to activate the "SharePoint Server Enterprise Search" and or "SharePoint Server Site Search" feature(s) for our web application (scope = SPWebApplication).