I have created a WildCard managed path named departments, and then under this managed path I have created five “Publishing site- enterprise Wiki” site collections.
Now, by default, each of the enterprise site collection will have a Search functionality to search all the Pages content, attachments etc.
But I want to allow users to either search a specific Site collection or to search all the site collectiosn under the specific managed path. How can this be done?
The default behavior of the Site Search box in 2013 is to search the site first and then when the user clicks the link to "Search Everything" that are taken to the global search center configured in the SSA. If you want an intermediate step where they only search the site collections under the Departments managed path there are a few approaches you can take.
You can make the process easier by creating Result Source for the departments managed path. Use a query like Path:http://mycompany/departments/*.
You could then add a search vertical to the search center for searching department content and direct the search query to use the Result Source you created above.
You could go one step further by creating a Query Rule that detects a user query for the Action Term "Department" and create a result block of results from the Departments Result Source.
