How Search Works in the Back End

Hey Friends, 

Very Basic, yet very Important Blog..

How Search Works?

a) When a user enter any query in the search column of a page. Web service of a web server will get this request.

b) Web server will send this request to search server/service. If in a farm webserver and search server lies in same server. Web service will send request to search service in same server itself.

c) Search server will look for that query in it index files.

Note: Index files are propagated to searc*h server after the indexing/crawl done by index server and propagated to search server at this default location: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Office Server\Applications. It can be changed acc to requirement.

Indexing/crawling concept can be check at my blog: How crawl works in SharePoint-how indexing work-basic concept

d) If search server get the result of the query in the index file.

e) It will pick the result of documents ,images etc. from the SQL , NAS etc.

f) Stream of result are provided in XML format to the Web service(web server).

g) Web service will convert the xml to html and return the result back to the client.