I've been wondering why so many people (as seen in newsgroup postings) have had problems getting search to work *at all*.

After all, all you need to do is get Shared Services setup; start the SharePoint Server Search Service and by default it will search your "Local Office SharePoint Server sites"

Hah!!

In fact all that has been specified by doing that lot is that *when you have specified Crawl Schedules* it will start indexing your "Local Office SharePoint Server sites".

The default for Crawl schedules is namely Off (actually not specified and thus Off).

Now this combination to my mind is Microsoft playing with us. Why give us a default "sites to search" and yet don't bother setting indexing of those "sites to search" going?

... and why remind the administrator that he's using the same username for the Central Administration application pool and yet don't remind the administrator that he hasn't turned crawling on yet ?

Someone wasn't thinking about how normal people behave.

Normal people expect if they are being spoon-fed to be spoon-fed with everything they need to do. Normal people expect that if a logical default is set that another logical default connected to it and essential for it is also set etc. etc.

We know they are all brilliant in Redmond but don't they have user testing labs too? I certainly thought they did. Maybe what they need is an "Administrator's Testing Lab" to get the illogical stuff out of their installation material (or some of it).

By the way I found the confirmation about "By default, this content source is not scheduled to run or crawl...." in page 568 of the Administrator's Companion book (MSPress http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735622825/heme0f). It's a pity imo it wasn't in bold text there.

P.S. I've of course earlier added the pdf image and run the IFilter but none of the PDF files contents were appearing on the Search page. Was it perhaps because the PDF files were ver 7.0 or ver 8.0 files? That would be a valid reason given that we still only have a 6.0 IFilter available to us from Adobe. However the reason is more prosaic - in addition to not including .pdf files in the lists of recognizable file types, Microsoft also haven't included .pdf in the list of file types that are going to be searched. For that you need to go to the "Manage File Types" section under Search settings.

P.P.S. Don't think of looking for this "Manage File Types" in a WSS 3.0 installation. I have been told in a newsgroup that it's not there and that instead there's KB Article 927675 that you should look at. (Not that it worked for him ....)