Sharepoint 2010 Search - Auto add property to QueryString

Question

Have a bit of a difficult question which as far as I can see, no one has really managed to fix yet.

Here's the scenario. Sharepoint 2010 EnterPrise Search Centre.

I've created a custom Search Results Page. I want people who type any word in the Search box to only display results where the Value provided by the user matches with a specific Managed Search Property.

Now I know a user can search for People with specific criteria by entering for example Continent:Europe in the actual Search Box. Sharepoint will refresh the page with the following added to the Query String: k=Continent:Europe and the results will only show people who are from Europe.

So my question is : How can I fix this so that the user does not have to enter the Continent:Europe in the Search box and can just type Europe?

Thanks

Answer 1

One option is to create your own webpart that acts as the search box and replaces the standard one with your custom search box. The advantage of this is that you can more tightly control the user interface and then set up the query passed to the server (with the "k" parameter). You could prepend "Continent:" before the search term entered to help narrow the search.

Another use for this is to append * onto any search term because the People search does include partial words by default.

We did this on one site to simplify the input and allow users to search with one text box (without the advanced features) and then users can use the refinements to narrow the search.