Have you ever wanted more capabilities when searching in SharePoint 2007? The good news is that Ontolica provides a free Wildcard search which can easily be installed in a MOSS 2007 SharePoint site.
The Ontolica download and install is a straight-forward process. It can be dowloaded for free from the
Ontolica site. Once installed, the Ontolica Wildcard search will automatically take the place of the search defined in the default master page of most of the SharePoint Site templates such as the Team Site. However, some of the Publishing master pages such as BlueBand.master will need to be modified for the Ontolica Wildcard search to work.
The reason the Wildcard search will "override" the default search in some sites and not others is due to the fact that the master page defined for Team Sites uses a delegate control and the masterpage for some of the publishing sites use a WebControl. Delegate controls are designed with the intent that they can be easily overridden. Delegate Controls are overridden in SharePoint by installing a control with the same id and a lower sequence number. The Ontolica Wildcard feature installs the Ontolica Wildcard search with a sequence number of 1 which overrides the default control that has a sequence number of 100. Here's a copy of the xml:
To get this to work in master pages such as the BlueBand.master, you will need to replace the Web Control reference in the PlaceHolderSearchArea content place holder with the Delegate control as demonstrated below:
Once this change is saved in BlueBand.master, the Ontolica Search will be "subsituted" for the default "SmallSearchInputBox" that comes out of the box with MOSS 2007.
Another issue I ran into when using the Ontolica Wildcard Search was getting the licensing properly configured so that Users didn't receive an error message on the search results page. As part of the Ontolica Wildcard Search install, an evaluation copy of some of the richer features of Ontolica Search are included. To get rid of the annoying message, you must "toggle" the "current license" from the Free Ontolica Evaluation License to the Free Ontolica Wilcard License. This action is performed in the Central Admin site under the Operations tab. You will find an Ontolica for SharePoint section in the bottom right corner of the screen. Select the Manage Ontolica Licenses option to see the screen below:
By default, the Free Ontolica Evaluation License will be selected. You will likely want to "toggle" this to the Free Ontolica Wildcard License unless you choose to purchase the richer-featured Ontolica Search capabilities. To toggle the licensing to the Free Ontolica Wildcard License, select the Free Ontolica Wildcard License drop-down and choose the "set as active license" option as demonstrated below:
The resulting License Manager screen should have a check-mark beside the Free Ontolica Wildcard License and no check-mark beside the Free Ontolica Evaluation License as demonstrated below: