Configure how the crawler authenticates (Search Server 2008)
Applies To: Microsoft Search Server 2008
Topic Last Modified: 2009-04-08
Note
Unless otherwise noted, the information in this article applies to both Microsoft Search Server 2008 and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express.
When Search Server 2008 crawls the content specified by your content sources, the crawler uses the default content access account, by default, to authenticate to the server that hosts the content. Therefore, you must request that the owners of the content that you are crawling grant full Read permissions to the account that you assigned as the default content access account and any other accounts that are provided through a crawl rule.
In some cases, especially if you are crawling content that is external to your organization, administrators might not want to grant access to the default content access account. In these cases, you might have to create a crawl rule that uses a different account to crawl that content.
Task requirements
Before you perform the procedures to complete this task, determine the authentication method that is used by the server that hosts the content that you are crawling. By default, Search Server uses NTLM authentication. Other supported authentication methods are Basic authentication, client certificates, forms-based authentication, and cookie authentication.
To change how the crawler authenticates to other servers, you can perform the following procedures: