Hi all,

I'm running SP2013 and using host named site collections architecture. At the moment my enterprise search centre is actually the landing site of our intranet at http://intranet.company.com. Each department is its own site collection, using host header managed path e.g. http://intranet.company.com/sites/it, /sites/hr etc.

We also have other site collections such as http://projects.company.com, http://tenant1.company.com.

I know if I do a search within the site collection of a given host header, e.g. searching within Intranet, results from IT and HR would return, and like wise searching within Projects I get everything under Projects whether it's a sub site or a site collections using host header managed path. 

My question is is there a way to have results returned from multiple site collections with different host header using one search centre? I'd like Intranet search to be able to also return results from the Projects site collection, or is this not possible?

My situation is similar to the poster here: http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/83310/location-for-search-center-in-a-sharepoint-2013-implementation

According to Matthew's response, all I have to do is "in each Site Collection configure the search settings to use the "global search center"". So I point the Projects site collection to use the Intranet search centre, uploaded a test file in the project site, did a incremental crawl, checked that the Projects site search picks up the test file, went to the Intranet search centre and did the same search but nothing came back. Am I missing something?

Thank you.

• Edited by Hyde1031 Friday, July 31, 2015 2:01 AM

Thanks Jason, my current setup does reflect the suggestion you've provided.

I do have the top site collection (root HNSC, same URL as the web app) in my content source, and it is the only one there, and as you said it covers all the HNSCs. I recently did a full crawl and all HNSC have been crawled. And search works individually on each site collection - siteA.domain.com shows results from siteA.domain.com, and siteB.domain.com shows results from siteB.domain.com, but I'm wondering if there is a way/setup that would allow me to show results from both siteA and siteB in one search. 

For example, I have a document called DocB in siteB.domain.com and DocA in siteA.domain.com. They BOTH contain the word "Test". I want to be able to do a search on the word "Test" and have both DocA and DocB show up in the same search result page.

Appreciate your help.

• Edited by Hyde1031 Friday, July 31, 2015 6:47 AM

I found a solution that works for me. You need to utilise Result Source and create a new Search Vertical.

Make sure the new Result Source is of the type "Remote SharePoint Site", and provide the HNSC URL you want to search for. It has to be HTTPS, and of course a certificate for the HNSC. In the query, set the Path to HNSC, don't worry if it doesn't return any results in the test section. Just ok and use it in your search result web part.

You can google "How to add a custom search vertical to your search results page in SharePoint 2013" for steps on setting up a Search Vertical.

• Marked as answer by Sara FanMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Monday, August 10, 2015 12:45 AM