Search across multiple sharepoint sites from one location

Question

We are using SharePoint 2013 and have multiple sites, libraries, and collections across the company. A lot of these sites reside on different servers across the network and geographically. There has been a request from the higher ups to see if there was is a way to have one location to search across all the sites. I have been looking around, and I think that the "Search Center Site" may be the solution, but I don't know. Is this the correct feature in SharePoint to use to collect all the documents into one location for a search? If this isn't, is this possible to do in SharePoint 2013? If there is a way can someone just point me to the resources so I can read up on it and provide an answer if this is possible or not and what will be needed to do a central search across all SharePoint collections.

Answer 1

You say you have sites on different "servers" do you actually mean separate SharePoint Farms? If so this is very easy to achieve. Select the SharePoint Farm and Search Service Application that you wish to be our "global" search application. On that farm configure the content sources with start addresses for the web applications in all the other farms, web applications, etc. On that farm create an Enterprise Search Center site and then configure it how you like to serve results from all of your locations.