Search features are only available for Windows SharePoint Services with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005.
Search is available per server or server farm. This means that search is either turned on or off for all top-level Web sites and subsites in your server farm or server.
Search can query most lists and all document libraries on your site. Search cannot query lists of lists (such as the Quick Launch bar) or surveys. Users can search the entire site or a single list within the site (for example, to search for a particular contact in the Contacts list).
SQL Server full-text searching is a good solution for searching Windows SharePoint Services Web sites in small or medium organizations.
Search catalogs can use up to 40 percent of the hard disk space that data uses.
There is a hard limit of 256 search catalogs per server; plus you will encounter performance issues when you reach 1 million rows in the search catalog table.
SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 full-text search supports only one language for each database.
SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 use language resources packages with full-text search catalogs.
When you enable full-text search in Windows SharePoint Services, a new, empty catalog is created by default and named ix_databasename. Content is added to this catalog as it is added to your new Web site.
Aside from enabling and disabling full-text search, any search management or monitoring must be done from within SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 with the SQL Server administration tools.
For more information about managing full-text search in SQL Server 2000, see "Administering Full-Text Features Using SQL Enterprise Manager" in SQL Server Books Online. For more information about managing full-text search in SQL Server 2005, see "Full-Text Search Administrator InfoCenter" in SQL Server 2005 Books Online.
When you search SharePoint sites by using SQL Server full-text searching, the search is performed by using a FREETEXT statement. Using FREETEXT allows searching by intent — all terms are stemmed, so that the query looks for all inflectional forms of each query term. For example, if you query for "swim", the query also returns results including "swam", "swum", "swimming", and so on.
Enabling Search in Windows SharePoint Services
After you have configured SQL Server 2000 to support full-text searching, you are ready to enable search for Windows SharePoint Services.
Enable search for Windows SharePoint Services
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On your server computer running Windows SharePoint Services, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint Central Administration.
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Under Component Configuration, click Configure full-text search.
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In the Search Settings section, select the Enable full-text search and index component check box.
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Click OK.