How do SharePoint search statistics get generated?

1
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We have a heavily customised SharePoint publishing (WCM) site that uses no web parts in order to meet with XHTML and (AA) accessibilty guidelines. The trouble is that the search functionality is not generating any usage statistics (Usage reports within Search Administration in the SSP). We know this is down to our customisations because we have a couple of the OOTB team sites in the farm which are generating search statistics. We are not sure where/how we need to fix this. It seems we may need to wire up a call to the search.asmx web service but I'm not sure. Perhaps we need to call something from within the SharePoint API as part of our call to the search service? I'm not sure.

Has anyone out there built a heavily customised SharePoint site (no web parts) and are logging search statistics, can you comment on how you did it? Or can anyoone provide insight into how the staistics are generated?

If it helps we are running a medium sized farm with 2 WFEs, 1 Index server and 1 SQL Server box. All Windows 2003 R2 SP2, 32-Bit. MOSS 2007 SP1 (plus December CU) Enterprise Edition.

Thanks, James.

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sharepointsearch
belongs on superuser.com – Mitch Wheat
I'm expecting the answer to this question to involve one or more of C#, .Net, SharePoint API, XSL, JavaScript and Web Services - that would have to be quite a "super user" to know all that. If I was asking how do I add a web part to a SharePoint page then maybe... – j.strugnell
I would say belongs on serverfault.com – Alex Angas
I guess I haven't worded my question very well - essentially a lot of custom code has been written (master pages, page layouts, custom controls, SharePoint Search API, XSL) and the result is that we are not seeing any search statistics generated. My question is if we're using custom code how do we generate search statistics in SharePoint? I agree it crosses boundaries that could lean it toward serverfault - is there a facility to "mirror" questions across the sites? I understand that we wouldn't want to duplicate in order to keep "one truth" but perhaps mirroring would be worthwhile, team? – j.strugnell
@j.strugnell: If you feel strongly there is a valid audience for both sites, feel free to ask in both sites. See meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4708/… and meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7000/… – Alex Angas

3 Answers

0
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have you checked Usage Reports in the CA-->Operations tab ?

0
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Our (intranet) site is heavily customized and the Search Usage Reports are turned on (they should be by default). You do have to enable ALL usage reporting options though, both in the SSP as in CA, the key one being "Enable search query logging.", in the SSP -> Usage reporting. I have also found that disabling / reenabling this option will sometimes help if it is already supposed to be running.

P.S. I will vote to move this question to serverfault as that is where this question belongs.

0
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The SharePoint search statistics is only gathered when you use the standard search webparts (SearchBoxEx, CoreResultsWebPart). This is because they use an internal hidden object to perform the searches, which, in turn, logs to the statistics. AFAIK there is no way (except possibly reflection) to write to these logs when using a custom search webpart.