Running two Search Service Applications isolates your collaboration and My Sites crawl pipelines at the cost of creating a search silo — users searching from the Enterprise Search Centre cannot see personal content. This post covers the dual-SSA federation pattern using Remote Result Sources: what it solves, where it falls short, and how to configure it step-by-step in Central Administration.
Search Service Application
Deploying a Custom SharePoint Search Topology with PowerShell (End-to-End)
Deploying a SharePoint Search topology has a precise order of operations — and specific failure modes that will waste hours if you don't know them in advance. This guide covers the four-script pipeline from SSA creation to topology activation, with clean-slate recovery steps for the most common deployment failures.
Designing the Right SharePoint Search Topology for Production SPSE Farms
The default SharePoint search topology gets you up and running quickly. For production farms, deliberate design choices around component placement, high availability, and crawl isolation are what turn a functional search deployment into a resilient one. This post explains all six search components, when to use a single SSA vs. dual SSA, and how to design the right topology before running a single script.
How to Set Up Search Architecture in SharePoint Subscription Edition After Migration
Search doesn't come with you after a SharePoint migration — the index cannot be moved, and everything must be re-crawled from scratch. This post walks through configuring the right SPSE search topology for your farm size, throttling the first crawl to protect farm performance, and remapping content sources using production-ready PowerShell scripts. All scripts are available in the Search Setup Bundle — a seven-script PowerShell toolkit for $49 on Gumroad, purpose-built for this exact migration moment.