Make Search Core Results web part to show everything

Question

I have a weird problem, on our local env we are using the Search Core Results web part in a custom search page. One of the things we do with it is to redirect the user to that page with the keyword "*" (to search for all) and with a refinement so the page will show all the results for that refinement. Something like this:

http://qa.somesite.org/Pages/SearchResults.aspx?k=*&r=%22owstaxIdVendorCategories%22%3d%239acd0660-a50d-4bbf-b80d-3598a8728df5%3a%22Commercial+Flooring%22

Now, this works perfectly in our env, but yesterday we've deployed the site in QA and that functionality is not working anymore, when the user gets redirected to the search results page there's a message saying "Your query included only common words and / or characters, which were removed. No results are available. Try to add query terms."

I know making the Search Core Results work with "*" as a keyword is kind of a hack. So I guess my question is, is there a working way to make the Search Core Results web part show/search for everything on the site? Does anyone had a experiencie similar to this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'm gonna give a suggestion based on how I approached a similar issue, and you can see if it helps your situation .

My problem was to display ALL documents in a given site collection and display them in a Core Results webpart, and then allow the user to refine the results based on the refinement panel from there.

Here are the steps that I took:

1. I implemented a Content Type that had a managed metadata column.

2. The managed metadata had a hierarchical set of terms with a root term of "All"

3. I added subcategories directly underneath All , eg Category1, category2, etc

4. I set the metadata column settings to appear in hierarchical format So the terms would be displayed as "All:Category1" or "All:Category2"

By doing the above 4 steps, the metadata columns are now setup to be queried to grab all items by doing using a query syntax of:

    ColumnManagedProperty:"All"

***remember to create a managed property for you metadata column, and do a full re crawl

**remember to enable STEMMING on the core results webpart

Answer 2

You need to make sure that your term is having the same ID in your QA environment (how did you provision your term ? From a database backup ? Created a new one ?)

owstaxIdVendorCategories"=#9acd0660-a50d-4bbf-b80d-3598a8728df5:"Commercial Flooring"

-> Make sure that the ID #9acd0660-a50d-4bbf-b80d-3598a8728df5 is mapped to an existing term (ideally the Commercial flooring) and that you have content in your QA environment that is tagged with that term and indexed from a recent crawl (and available to the current user doing the query)

Answer 3

Instead of using the asterix (*) for a wildcard search, you can use the pound/hash symbol (#) to return "everything". (Minus the parenthesis of course)