Federated Search in SharePoint 2010 - Part 2

In the Federated Search Part 1 we covered how to use Federated Search. In this Part we will see how to custmoize the pre defined locations and how to create new locations. Location defines from where the Federated Search Web Part will show the results. We can also customize the result presentation using the locations.

To access predefined locations we need to go to Central Administration and go to Query SSA. There the Federated locations are defined.

Here are the predefined locations which are available for SharePoint:

Now we will create a new location to show the top news results from Google for the keyword specified in SharePoint search. Here are the steps to create a new location:
1. Click on the New Location.
2. We need to provide the name, Display Name, Location and Author of the Location. The Display name will be available in the web part to select this location name.
3. The next two parameters are important and define the Type of the location and Query Template. The type of the location specifies the nature of the location. We can have the results from the Search index stored on the server farm or from the Search Engines supporting the OpenSearch protocals.
4. The Query Template is the query in which we specify the query used to search the data. To get the top google news result we will use the following query:
http://news.google.com/news?q={SearchTerms}&output=rss
so in this query we will be passing the query parameter using the q.

5. Other fileds we can leave for now. They can help to customize the UI of the results and the data returned from the engine. We will see this in the Part 3 of this post.
6. Now we need to select this location in the Federated Results Web Part:.

7. Now the Google News Results are displayed like: