How does SharePoint Search handle pending (unapproved) items?

Question

How does SharePoint Search handle the indexing of pending (unapproved) items/documents? As far as I can see there are no pending documents in the index. These seems a little odd to me, since it would be nice, if I could search for all pending items in a site or sitecol. Is it possible to change the behavior of indexing pending items?

Answer 1

SharePoint Search does by default not index unapproved items as well as draft versions (minor versions). This is so because the search crawling account only has read access to the content and only users with contribute access or better can see unapproved documents and draft versions. Consequently, you could get around the issue by granting contribute access to the search crawling account. But I would not recommend it as your search results will then show documents that are not accessible to users with read-only access.

Answer 2

Sharepoint by default only crawls major version of content, because the content acces account only has read permissions one the sharepoint site.

For more details on search and security trimming...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2304855

http://www.sharepointblues.com/2010/03/17/draft-item-security-search-results-security-trimming/

Hope it helps.