How to search System Center 2012 documentation on TechNet using Bing (no…not that way)

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A not so techie post today. J

The ConfigMgr UX team (docs team) blog here that explain how to use a feature of Bing to search their documentation (the MSDN/TechNet team's SDK blog post here about the feature). This feature lets you search just for the documentation for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager rather that all of TechNet. This is very useful when you're looking for a common term, but only in the context of ConfigMgr. This feature is also in the documentation of this feature for use with ConfigMgr here.

Here are some helpful product filters for System Center 2012 to nodes in TechNet:

?         App Controller
site:technet.microsoft.com meta:search.MSCategory(hh552973)
(link to Bing results)

? Configuration Manager
site:technet.microsoft.com meta:search.MSCategory(gg682056)
(link to Bing results)

? Data Protection Manager
site:technet.microsoft.com meta:search.MSCategory(hh758347)
(link to Bing results)

? Endpoint Protection
site:technet.microsoft.com meta:search.MSCategory(hh479670)
(link to Bing results)

? Operations Manager
site:technet.microsoft.com meta:search.MSCategory(hh546788)
(link to Bing results)

? Orchestrator
site:technet.microsoft.com meta:search.MSCategory(hh237244)
(link to Bing results)

? Service Manager
site:technet.microsoft.com meta:search.MSCategory(hh546791)
(link to Bing results)

? Virtual Machine Manager
site:technet.microsoft.com meta:search.MSCategory(gg610702)
(link to Bing results)

<geeky_explanation>

This feature allows to use Bing to directly search against the meta HTML tags that sites use to tag their sites.  Meta tags are sort of like headers, but in the HTML.  The search.MSCategory tag is a special tag for search engines…to get it for a page, we need to use the special robot version of the page, for example the VMM documentation here can be access using the robot page here: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/gg610610(robot).aspx.  Once you have that, hit View Source in IE.  You'll see a bunch more meta HTML tags versus the normal page, one of which will be the search.MSCategory we are looking for.  You'll see a few in of them as follows:

? bb126093 = TechNet Library

? cc138020 = System Center

? hh546793 = System Center 2012

? gg610702 = Virtual Machine Manager

How do I know the friendly name?  This maps to the nodes in the site as follows:

 

With that, we can now plug the following string into Bing site:technet.microsoft.com meta:search.MSCategory(gg610702) to search for information about VMM. For example, to get information about WSUS relating to VMM 2012: https://www.bing.com/search?q=WSUS+site%3Atechnet.microsoft.com+meta%3Asearch.MSCategory%28gg610702%29

Now…the fun bit is this works for other meta HTML tags in the robot view, some interesting ones:

?         Search.MSHAttr.DCS.appliesToProduct (for example, SCServiceManager or SCConfigurationManager)

?         Search.MSHAttr.DCS.appliesToVersion (for example, 2012 or 2007 ?)

?         Search.MSHAttr.appliesToProduct (for example, System Center 2012 Configuration Manager)

</geeky_explanation>

Happy Binging! J

Saud