Search results differ between accounts?

Question

I am an admin for SP2010 site. One of our clients has noticed that when he does a search for anything he never gets any results. However, when I do a search using the same query he has, I get results. I have Full Control and they have Contribute (which I assumed was high enough). Any idea why this might be so?

The users account is a brand new account created maybe less than an hour ago, not sure if that matters.

Answer 1

It does matter, SharePoint security trims the search results. When the crawler runs it looks at the ACLs for the files and builds the security trimmed list. If you use group security you should not need a new crawl to refresh the list, but if you use individual permissions it can take a crawl before a user sees search results.