Tuesday, December 11, 2012

No search results on anonymous SP2010 website

Last week I had an issue with search on SharePoint 2010. It turned out that we didn't had any results on our public website with anonymous access. Results showed up in our authoring zone (with authenticated users).
A lot of the suggestions Google came up with weren't applicable in this situation. It turned out the Anonymous policy on one of the zones of the web application was 'Deny all'. This zone wasn't crawled, but the policy was still propagated to the index and used on the other zone. This meant that, as the content had a deny all flag for anonymous users, security trimming didn't allowed the return of any results.