I was recently asked about what sort of things should be in a job description for a person who manages search in a SharePoint environment. I say all of the time that search isn’t a product — it’s a process. What I mean by that is the product will only get you so far. A human will have to be involved to make the tool really valuable. Here’s what I sent to the client as a final set of activities/skills/responsibilities:

• Review and Resolve Crawl Logs for Errors and Warning
• Review Crawl Logs for Performance and Heartbeat
• Periodically review performance data for the search indexer to identify impending performance issues
• Manage the indexing process
  • Review requests for new content sources
  • Develop, monitor, and tune content crawling schedules
  • Implement appropriate crawler impact rules
  • Implement and maintain crawl rules to control what content is in the index
  • Work with network operations to control permissions for the crawler account to manage what is in the index
  • Manage search scopes
• Review usage reports and work with the organization to improve relevancy by leveraging out of the box tuning parameters including:
  • Changes to the noise words files
  • Changes to the thesaurus file
  • Changes to the authoritative sites list
  • Changes to keywords and best bets

Thanks to Spencer Harbar and Ben Curry for their contributions to this.