Question

I’ve enabled the Custom Site Collection Help feature in my Sharepoint 2010 install, and verified that it works by creating a Help Collection folder and uploading some html files as Help Topics.

The problem is that the search box at the top of the help windows doesn’t work – it just gives me a message of “Search Service Not Found.”. It looks like this only occurs when I have the custom site collection selected in the search scopes drop-down, as when I select one of the default Sharepoint search collections, such as “Sharepoint Server 2010”, I can search and find results. I’ve reset the search index, done a full crawl and can search for and find help content from the main site search page (using the All Content scope), but still get the “Search Service not found” result.

Has anybody else come across this problem and found a way resolve it? Is there another service hidden away somewhere that I have to enable?

Answer 1

I found the answer here: “Search service not found” SharePoint 2010 Custom Site Collection Help

If you’re getting “Search service not found” executing search against SharePoint 2010 Custom Site Collection Help do the following:

1. Make sure SharePoint Foundation Search Service is setup and running in Central Admin (it will change to Foundation Help Search Service after initial startup)

2. Associate your content databases that use Custom Site Collection Help with SharePoint Foundation Help Search service

It worked for me. Some notes:

1. During "SharePoint Foundation Search Service" configuration I didn’t change anything…

2. In order to "Associate your content databases…", see Configure content database settings (Office SharePoint Server): set "Search Server" there.