Scopes

Configure a scope when you want to present users with a limited view of a collection.

A scope is a group of related URIs in an index. When you configure a scope, you limit the documents that users can see in the collection. When users search the collection, they search only the documents in the scope, not the entire index. To use this capability, your search applications must include support for searching scopes.

When you create a scope, you specify a range of URIs in the index that users are able to search. Limiting the documents that users can search helps ensure that documents in the search results are specific to the information that users seek.

For example, you might create one scope that includes the URIs for your Technical Support department and another scope that includes the URIs for your Human Resources department. If your enterprise search application supports scopes, users in the Technical Support department will retrieve documents from the Technical Support scope, and users in the Human Resources department will retrieve documents from the Human Resources scope.

You can create as many scopes as you want, although creating too many scopes can affect performance. Configure scopes so that most search requests need to filter only on one or two scopes. Because scopes can contain entire URIs or URI patterns, the same document can belong to more than one scope.