SharePoint Secrets

The following is an illustration accompanying an article published on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Enterprise search in SharePoint Server 2007 depends on two main components . An indexing service on a central server crawls enterprise data resources and builds full-text indexes to speed search. Query servers allow users to conduct searches. (In small-scale deployments, the indexing and query server can be combined on a single machine.) Out of the box, the SharePoint Server 2007 indexing service reads data from more than 200 types of sources, including SharePoint sites, HTML pages on other types of intranet sites, files on file servers, Exchange Public Folders, and Lotus Notes databases. The service can be extended to index more data types by installing additional iFilters, which are usually written by third-party ISVs or partners. A separate technology known as protocol handlers lets the indexing service retrieve dat...

I have a medium Moss farm 3 frontend servers Index server and DB server. I am at the part of adding the index server to the farm all is good but I am confused on the 2 check boxes "Use this server to index content" and "User the server for serving search queries" What is the difference? Do I check both if this is a dedicated Index Server? This is a very important distinction, and the decisions depend on your preferred architecture and performance. The index portion is definitely a requirement for making that your dedicated index server. This gives it the role of building and storing the index. The query role does not have to be on your index server. You can instead use your web front ends (1 or more) as query servers. What this does is it tells the index server to propagate its index to the WFEs that are set as query servers so that they have a local copy of the index. Then, when someone does a search (this is done on the WFE), then that WFE will search itself...