Question summary: What are the recommendations regarding search
functionality and Indexing Service for Internet Service Providers?

Problem: Implementing search functionality with Indexing Services on a Web
Hosting environment on Windows 2003 Server platform is a challenge. A lot of
the customers uses MS FrontPage to maintain their websites, and want to use
the integrated Web Search component in their web pages. This could earlier
be done using WAIS search, setting registry key noindexserver = 1 if Index
Server was installed. With Windows 2003 Server platform and IIS 6.0, running
FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions, Microsoft announced that WAIS no longer
exists (at least with the FPSE 2002 version included with the Windows 2003
Server family). This means that the Search Component in FrontPage needs to
use Indexing Service to work properly. If we create a catalog in Indexing
Service, and let it track the spesific website - everything is fine. You can
easily create a search page in FrontPage using a Search Component, and it
will use the catalog, and display the correct results.

But the problem is: Microsoft does not recommend ISPs to create separate
catalogs for each site, because of the heavy resource consuming of the
catalogs. The rather prefered way is to create ONE catalog, and then have
each sites directory listed under that one catalog. Using this in an ASP
page with ADO works, but the FrontPage Search component won't work anymore.
One of the main problems is that the VPATH variable returns an empty string,
because the search was on a physical directory and not a virtual directory.
(You can see this because there is no globe on the folder icon in the
Indexing Service administration console).

There can be thousands of websites on one Windows server, so creating
separate catalogs per website seems like a bad idea.

- So what can one do to make FrontPage Search component work with only ONE
catalog?

- What is the recommended setup of Indexing Services search for an ISP
regarding one vs. several catalogs?

Regards,

Terje

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