Over the last week my team has received reports from customers running both MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010 that Federated Search Results are no longer working. The Federated location in question seems to be centered around Bing/live.com.

I setup a test this morning in my SP2010 lab and I can confirm the out of the box (OOB) “Internet Search Results” Federated location is no longer working. In fact when you add the Federated Web Part on a Search Results page and choose this location a very long delay will occur when attempting to render the search results page. Doing a sniff I can see the original request for search.live.com gets redirected to bing.com which has been typical in the past however the difference is that instead of being an RSS response, as specified in the format query string parameter, the response is sent back in HTML which injects a delay as the results are processed. Eventually the results cannot be processed and the Search Federated Results Web Part does not render any output.

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Ran into an issue the other day on SharePoint 2010 Search when configuring Managed Properties, specifically I was setting the MaxCharactersInPropertyStoreIndex value on a Managed Property. This is an integer value and is documented here. The maximum value for this property is 450 however if you set this value to its maximum value you will start seeing errors with your crawls and in our case the crawls never would complete. Taking a look at the application event log we can see the following error logged:

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Just had a conversation with a couple instructors in the speaker room here at the BPUK Conference. What is the most efficient way to get a list of sites a user has permissions to. Search of course, it does the security trimming for you and it has a master list of all sites within SharePoint (assuming you crawl SharePoint sites).

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A good friend of mine Steve Peschka did a blog post during the SharePoint 2010 Beta which shows how to include a document’s rating within search results without writing any code. Well its been almost a year since that post and allot of things have changed. Since we RTM’ed SharePoint 2010 there are several key components to that blog that no longer work and this post is an attempt to update and hopefully add a little to the effort he started.

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