Vision

SharePoint 2007: Enterprise Search - Beta1TR

April 11, 2006

Customize look and functionality

With the Enterprise Search feature you can customize the look and feel and the functionality of the Search Center pages and the Search Web Parts in the browser. A search center page looks like this:

You can, via the toolpane of the advanced search web part (which is used in the search center page) customize the functionality. The tool pane has different sections, like search box and scope, but also layout and appearance to customize the look and feel. This screenshot will show you the search box section of the toolpane.

Creating custom search pages

Besides customizing the web parts you can also create custom search pages directly from the user interface. We will show how to create a basic search page and a search results page. We will add a tab to the Search Center page and to the Search Results page, we will call this tab Products.

We will make 2 new pages, called product.aspx and productresults.aspx which will respectively be our new search and search results pages. Our product.aspx page will contain a search box web part and our productresults.aspx page will contain a search core results web part.

After configuring the web parts with the correct business data catalog, the search center page will contain an extra tab and when you search you will find the results on your own results page.

Create custom web parts

Finally, if you still want to make customizations which are not possible via the browser, you can also create custom web parts using the Query object model so you can execute queries against the search component.

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