I’ve seen this problem come up a few times, so I thought I’d share a couple of quick things to look at when troubleshooting this search problem with MOSS. The problem was that when issuing a MOSS Search using the “This Site” or “This List” filter, no results would be returned. However, when issuing the search against “All Sites” would work just fine.
Just to check off the basic things to look at, the following was fine:
1) The crawler (default content access) account did have permissions to all content sources
2) The content source URL for the SharePoint web application was listed
3) There are no errors in the crawl log that suggest that an access denied or other error occurs
4) The WSS Search and MOSS Search services are running correctly.
5) There are no other problems with the SSP.
Again, search results did show up using the All Sites, so this isn’t an IFilter or other problem with the index or query service.
The solution involved two different changes that I made:
1) Make sure the content database has a Search Server specified. You can set this inside Application Management –> Content Databases –> (Properties for your content database).
2) Make sure that the URL specified as a content source matches the default URL defined in your Alternate Access Mappings (AAM). For example, if you create a web application and do not specify a host header, the URL will become http://servername, where servername is the NetBIOS name of the computer. Many organizations opt to create CNAME aliases inside DNS and use an internet friendly URL such as http://moss or http://portal. If you do this, you should also set up an Intranet zone URL for the friendly name. However, when configuring the content source, use the default URL. (Note: There are other ways to accomplish this such as extending the Web Application which will create additional AAM entries for you, but you should still ensure that the default zone is the one you specify in your list of content sources).
Hopefully this will help save you some time and solve a nagging problem.