MOSS Search Scopes Missing in Action?

Are you suffering from your custom search scopes not showing up in your scopes dropdown on your site?
Do you add a scope and wonder why it has not turned up?

Well suffer no more! For as little as a few dollars a day your ........ ahhhh you get the idea! :)

A friend of mine (we will call him Ryan for argument sake) was trying desperately to add a new search scope to his site. He went where most would go Central Admin > Shared Service Provider Settings > Search Settings > View Scopes. Added his scope to the list under the "shared" group, added his scope rules and waited for the scopes to be updated (couple of mins). Then low and behold his scope did not turn up in the search scopes drop down on his portal site.

He dropped me an email to see if it was something in his set up. I tried it out and funnily enough it didn't work for me either.

I did some digging with another buddy of mine who pointed me to a critical setting that I had missed.

You need to go into your Site Collection Settings menu > Search Scopes page. In there you will see your new scope ... but set as un-used.

To use it you need to:

  • Click on the "Search Dropdown" link
  • Tick the checkbox beside your new scope and set the order
  • OK
  • Wait a couple of mins (not sure how long ... but wait 5 mins ... probably caching the scopes somewhere)

Your scope should now be visible!