SharePoint 3.0: Error: Your search cannot be completed...

Description:

Upon submitting a search query using an advanced search box, selecting more than one search scope checkbox from the advanced search web part, the corresponding search results page returns no results and instead returns the following errror:

"Your search cannot be completed because of a service error. Try your search again or contact your administrator for more information."

Further testing and attempts to isolate the issue resulted in finding out that one scope in particular seemed to be problematic. When this particular search scope was used in the search query, the results page would return an error. However, if this scope was not selected during the query, then the search results would display normally.


Solution:

The problem scope, called "All Content," initially had the following scope rules:

* All Content, Include
* ContentSource = People, Exclude

The steps to resolve the issue are as follows:

1. Remove all existing scope rules
2. Create new scope rules to explicitly define each content source such as:
* ContentSource = Content Source 1, Include
* ContentSource = Content Source 2, Include
* ContentSource = Content Source 3, Include
* ContentSource = People, Exclude
3. Update scopes