Search Programmer's Guide

The Search portion of the Microsoft® Site Server SDK, hereafter referred to as the Search SDK, provides COM objects that you can use to automate many of the administrative tasks of a Search system and build and distribute searchable catalogs. Among the administrative tasks you can automate are specifying the properties of a catalog definition, including the ability to invoke catalog building whenever document content changes.

A catalog is an index of documents that contains information about each document, such as its title and subject. The catalog contains the location of each document, not the document itself.

You can use these objects when developing applications with user interfaces, or you can use these objects to provide administrators with Microsoft Windows® Scripting Host (WSH) scripts that they can use to configure Search and to gather statistical information.

Note   The Search SDK does not provide objects for initiating search requests or for managing search results. See the main Microsoft Site Server product documentation for information on the Query and Utility objects, SQL queries, and how to use the ADO RecordSet object for processing search results.

Search System Component Overview

This section is a brief overview of the Search system components. See the main Microsoft Site Server product documentation for more information on the Search system components.

A Search host is a computer running Microsoft Windows NT® Server on which Search is installed. A Search system comprises one or more Search hosts that work together to create, maintain, and store your catalogs.

Search hosts are divided into the following functional groups:

• Catalog Build Server. These Search hosts are where you create catalog definitions, which tell Search where to get information and what type of information to get when building a catalog. Based on the catalog definition settings, a catalog build server gathers information and builds catalogs. It also distributes the resulting catalogs to the Search servers where site visitors can search for documents.
  
  
• Search Server. These Search hosts are where the completed catalogs are stored for searching.

A Search host can function as both a catalog build server and a search server.

In the Microsoft Management Console under Search, these two servers are represented as icons under each host in the system.

Propagating Catalogs

After a catalog build server has built a catalog from a catalog definition, it propagates the completed catalog to the specified search servers. A catalog can be propagated to as many as 32 search servers, where site visitors can search the completed catalog.

Although you can use just one host for both building and searching catalogs, propagating catalogs to other hosts can be useful.

• You can dedicate one server to building catalogs, and dedicate multiple servers to searching catalogs. Because building a catalog can consume system resources, site visitors can search catalogs quicker on dedicated search servers.
  
  
• If your site experiences a high volume of use, multiple search servers can distribute the load with a round-robin approach.
  
  
• By using multiple hosts, you can increase the reliability of your system; for example, if one host goes down, other hosts will continue to function.

Terminology

The Search SDK naming conventions are slightly different than the naming conventions used in the Search product documentation and in the administrative tools. The following table shows the relationship between the two.