FS4SP - Creating a Search Vertical in your Search Center

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The default Fast Search Server for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP) comes with 2 verticals out of the box : All Sites and People.

One may want to add further verticals to refine results for a type of contents (videos, feeds) or create a regionalized vertical (selecting documents with a sub or specific department within your organization).

In this post, I will guide you through creating a quick vertical to select search content from a specific region aka EMEA.

  • Open your FAST Search Center site
  • Click on Site Actions
  • Select the Site Contents

  • In the Pages section, note that the layout the pages are assigned to.

  • Now it is time to create our own page, hit the New menu
  • Fill up the new page form and select the appropriate layout. Here I'm creating my search box page called EMEA.aspx

  • Hit the Create button.
  • Repeat the same operation to create your EMEA Results page (layout is "Search Results")

  • Verify in the pages list that we have now 2 new pages for handling our EMEA Vertical.

  • Now Let's integrate those new pages in our existing FAST Search Center.
  • Go to your FAST Search Center.
  • Edit the current page and in the Tabs section (above the Search TextBox), click "Add New Tab"

 

  • We will now add a new tab called EMEA that will point to our EMEA.aspx page (Search Box layout).

  • Once added and your page saved, refresh it and the new tab "EMEA" should appeared.

  • We will now focus on integrating the EMEA results page.
  • Click on your new vertical EMEA and execute a simple query (in my case "a"). You will notice that we miss the EMEA Results vertical.
  • Also notice that the page we ended up showing results is still results.aspx.

  • To point our EMEA Search Box page to the EMEA Search Results page, go back to your FAST Search center default page.
  • Click on the EMEA vertical (so we will modify that particular page only)
  • Edit the page
  • Edit the Search Box Web Part properties

 

  • In the target search results page URL change results.aspx to emearesults.aspx.
  • Click Apply, Save your page and refresh
  • With the EMEA Vertical selected, execute the same simple query as before ("a")
  • You should now see the emearesults.aspx being displayed.

 

  • Still we are missing our EMEA tab in the Search Results page this time.
  • Using a similar approach, we need to edit the search results page, Edit the Tabs, Add our EMEA Search Results entry

 

  • Save your new entry, Save the Page and refresh it.
  • Your Search Results page now integrate your new vertical

You can now switch from one vertical to another and present end-users with specific results . Here in my above example I customized my EMEA Results page to show the MS logo to create a differentiator between verticals (helping end-users).

Et voila !

You have now a Search vertical, your new move will be to define what type of results your vertical should show.

You now want to :

* Add specific query parameters to your emea.aspx Search Box (Edit WP Props)

* Use a different Federated Location in the Search Core Results WP of your EMEA Results page (edit WP props).

* Use a scope to refine results from an existing Federated Location.

etc.

 

Happy Verticals !