SharePoint Fanatic

I had an interesting challenge.  I was asked to limit Search Crawling to a single subsite.  The underlying issue was that a great deal of security in this farm was implemented via Audiences which is not a secure method of locking down content. Audiences expose documents and items to users, but don’t prevent the user from actually accessing the documents or items.  Search Content Sources expect to have nice and simple Web Application URLs to crawl.  So how best to restrict crawling to a subsite?

The simple answer is set up the Content Source to crawl the whole Web Application, but set up Crawl Rules to exclude everything else.  Only two rules are needed:

1. Include: List the site to include, such as http://sharepoint/sites/site1/site2*.*
   Note the * at the end to ensure all sub-content is crawled.  Being the first crawl rule, this takes precedence over the next. Don’t forget the *.*
   It seems the testing of the crawl rule with just a * will appear to capture all content, but at crawl time, only a *.* will capture content with a file extension.
2. Exclude: List everything else: http://*.*
   This will exclude anything not captured in the first rule.
3. If you have a content source that includes people (sps3://sharepoint) be sure to use a wildcard on the protocol as well.

Voila!