So, I may not have the entire story together here but can you answer the following question:
Question: What does the WSS (or MOSS) Search box have to do with Alternate Access Mappings?
Answer: Everything
I received a call stating that the search box had “disappeared” from my the individual’s SharePoint site. I had assumed the individual had deleted some sort of the code from the page where the search box was located. Not so – no one had apparently done anything out of the ordinary.
We had made some configuration changes on how the server was configured. I did some of the normal debugging and found several errors in the Eventlog that the search crawler was unable to crawl certain site collections – and recommended updating the Alternate Access Mappings (AAM). This seemed odd as I was able to access the site both on and off the server.
Here is what was going on: since the Index service was unable to access the site, SharePoint assumed there was no content to be searched – so it flipped a switch somewhere that said, in short “Since there is not index content – don’t show the search box”.
I updated the AAM, re-initiated a crawl, and the search box showed up.
Moral of the Story – Make sure your AAM’s are set up correctly even if the SharePoint site is showing up for the end user.
Tags: Search, SharePoint
