SharePoint Search. Search site with AD credentials

Question

I'm not sure if this has been asked and answered already but hopefully I can explain my problem well enough.

Our staff intranet portal can be accessed only with AD accounts. We would like to have SharePoint Search crawl the site and index pages. So basically SharePoint Search crawler needs to authenticate with the site somehow to have access to the content.

Would anyone happen to have any resource that they could share with me to read or at least guide me in the right direction. I would appreciate that very much.

Let me know if you need more info or clarification.

Answer 1

You would need an AD account that is configured as a SharePoint search crawl account (means has read access on the whole farm). Normally this account should already exist.

It might be that your specific staff site is not showing up in the search results, that would be because: a) the specific location is not being crawled b) the specific location is explicitly excluded from a crawl

You will need to configure this in the SharePoint Central Administration, under service applications (Search Service Application). The first point by checking the content sources, what they are crawling. The second point could be configured on your site or on the central administration (http://techmikael.blogspot.no/2013/04/limiting-search-results-in-sharepoint.html ).