Friday, April 10, 2009

SharePoint Best Bets Search

One of the things that people are not aware of is that you can customize the search results coming from the SharePoint search engine. The results, which is XML, given by the engine are styled using XSLT. If you create your own XSLT you can customize/restyle your results page.
There is a '
Visual How To' by Patrick Tisseghem explaining the steps you need to do to customize the search page.
You can do the same trick with the Best Bets meaning, you can customize them by applying your own XSLT. Before we are going to customize the Best Bets, Kevin explains what they do an how you can use them.
Best Bets are used to promote some results depending on your search keywords. If you look at the screenshot below you see that when I type SharePoint in the search box, U2U and Microsoft are pushed forward as results where you definitely can find something about SharePoint. So if you think about it, Best Bets is a way for an administrator to earn some extra money, the one who pays the most gets on top of the list.

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