The purpose of the Search Service Application is to provide enterprise search and crawling, so yes you should be able to use any search service application instance. I'm not sure where you heard that you need to create a new instance and you can't use the old one... The only thing I can think is if this is a standalone farm, the account you use for crawling will not likely have access to resources outside of SharePoint (file shares, web sites, other farms) though creating a new search instance wouldn't resolve this issue. Jason Warren Infrastructure Specialist Habanero Consulting Group habaneroconsulting.com/blog

I google some links to show me how to configure search. They all returned with creating a new Search Service Application and did not mention I can use the existing one which was created by SharePoint. Here are the links that I found to talk about creating a new Search Service Application which confused me. I thought we have to create a new Search Service Application to enable Search until I saw there is an existing Search Service Application defined on SharePoint 2010 and not being used. http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/Roji.Joy/configure-search-in-sharepoint-2010/ http://blog.concurrency.com/sharepoint/search-configuration-in-sharepoint-2010/ Thanks for letting me know that I can use the default Search Service Application without creating a new one. I will configure this Search Service for crawling. Brian. Brian

By default, SharePoint 2010 installation would install "Search Service Application" service. Why do we need to create a new Search service for Crawling? Can we use this default Search Service Application for the Enterprise search and crawling? Thanks, Brian.Brian