To configure a Search results page to return a column name in place of the document synopsis, follow the instructions below.  In this case we were required to replace the document synopsis with a custom column called DocumentSubject from the document metadata.

• Add the column name as a mapped property.
• Navigate to a search results page and Edit the page to access the web parts
• In the Search Core Results Web Part select Edit and Modify the Web Part
• In the Search Core Results settings window navigate to the Results Query Options
• Select the Selected columns and enter the column name to be displayed, in this case <Column Name=”DocumentSubject”/> and Click OK to save the change
• In Data View Properties click XSL Editor
• Navigate to the section beginning  <div class=”srch-Description”>
• To remove the synopsis from the search result, delete the section from as highlighted in the screenshot above
• Under the tag <div class=”Srch-Description”> enter the following line for the column name to appear in the search result
  <xsl:value-of select”=documentsubject”/> </div>
• Click Save to save the changes, click Apply and Ok the see the changes in the search results page.

The Search Result will now bring back the Document Subject for the document.

Thought I’d give some information around index files becoming corrupt on front end servers within a SharePoint farm.  This can sometimes happen due to a network or database failure while a crawl is in progress.  It will result in errors appearing in the Application Event Logs ressembling the following:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Office Server Search
Event Category: Search service
Event ID: 10038
Date:                       8/8/2009
Time: 9:53:02 AM
User: N/A
Computer: WFE1
Description:
Query machine WFE1′ has been taken out of rotation due to this error: The
content index is corrupt.   0xc0041800.  It will be retried in 15 seconds.
Component: c9dba2c2-0077-46f7-b352-aeeddb6ac2fd

In the case where there are multiple front end servers in the farm, end users will remain unaffected since their search queries will be served by the other front end server, but this issue can cause crawls to hang and will log errors to the application logs every time a crawl is attempted.

This happened on one of our production environments recently, and the first thought was that we should reset the indexes and recrawl the content (which would have worked, but would have taken about 3 days to re-crawl everything and we wanted it working by Monday morning).  So in trying to avoid a recrawl, we did the following:

• Open the Operations tab of the Central Administration site
• Select Services on Servers and choose the offending WFE from the list
• Stop the Office Server Search Service on the WFE
• Start the service again, but give a new location for the index file
• The next time the crawl runs, the index will be propagated to the new location and bring the server back into rotation.

Hope this helps avoid many hours of re-crawling content.