Having one search center for two different SharePoint 2016 farms

Question

I want to ask you if you have experience of setting up, of course first of all if its possible to have one search center URL shared between two SharePoint 2016 farms. So, we have like two SharePoint 2016 farms with one shared search service application.The first farm its acting as an Collaboration farm and the other one is an Intranet one. The intranet farm has its own search center url ( https://Farm1WebApp1/search ) and when you search you are lead to actual search center result page ( https://Farm1WebApp1/search/pages/results.aspx?k=.. ) , but the second one when you search something you are getting some default search url and the result is presented via this page (https://Farm2WebApp2/_layouts/15/osssearchresults.aspx ). Because of this I was wondering if its possible to set the same search center URL for both farms and when someone regardless of which farm ( farm1 or farm 2) and site collection ( from both farms ) tries to search we want the results to be presented lets say via this url ( https://Farm1WebApp/search/Pages/x.aspx?k=...... )

Any idea how we can implement this would be great to read, and of course as I have said if this is possible, to have one shared search center for both SharePoint farms, that would share the same URL.

Thanks in advance, Jovica

Answer 1

Yes this is possible and indeed very easy, especially if you want to have just one url for the search center.

1. First you need to set up on farm1 so it crawls farm2 (central admin, search settings add new content source or update the exisisting with farm2 url) you will need to grant application level access on farm2 to the account set up as crawling in farm1.

2. With crawled content now you can make a flip for each site in farm 1 you need to update the search center url. So it points to farm 2 (if you have many sites best to do it with PowerShell) You can manually test it (sitesettings-->search settings and update the default search center url)