How do I configure search across farms?

Question

I have two Sharepoint 2010 farms called FarmA and FarmB. Both farms have web applications and content. FarmA is also a publisher of the Search Service Application. It has been configured to crawl content in both FarmA and FarmB.

I have successfully published the Search Service and the consuming FarmB see results from both farms when I do a search from a Enterprise Search Center site collection. The issue that I'm having is that when I do the same search in FarmA, I only see results from FarmA. I'm not sure if the results are getting security trimmed. I am using different farm accounts for each farm, though I am accessing both web applications with my account. Or is there some additional configuration required on FarmA to show results from FarmB?

Answer 1

Since you are seeing results from both farms in FarmB we can assume that content from both farms is in the index, so this is not an issue with the crawl account. If you are using the same AD account when doing the search in both farms you would expect the security trimming would be consistent between the two farms, since the user would have the same access to the content in both cases.

Are you sure that you have set up the search in FarmA correctly so that it is using the enterprise search and All Sites scope. Could you somehow be still using the contextual scope on FarmA? (double-check that it goes to the enterprise search page).

Answer 2

I am guessing it is getting security trimmed as you said. Have you verified the content access (crawl) account. Make sure it has full read permissions on each web application.