One of my colleagues was asking how to save a SharePoint Search. It’s a bit of a question of how many ways to skin a cat…

The important thing to remember is that a simple search is just a URL, and specifies the search term and scope in the k and s parameters respectively. E.g. This search url:

http://deltamoss01/searchcenter/Pages/Results.aspx?k=Badgers&s=All%20Sites

would run a search for badgers in the All Sites scope.

It is worth noting, however, that this is saving the search, not a set of search results. As the index is updated, the results on this page may vary. Also, advanced searches don’t pass their parameters as GET parameters (i.e. within the URL), so you can’t save these the same way. I’ve not yet found a way to save them.

As another note, the standard Search results page shows the ‘Alert Me’ link:

This lets you set up email alerts about new items that match a search:

Really, that’s pretty neat.

Anyway, assuming that you’re not going to use Alerts, then you’re looking at storing URLs. You could use a List, such as a links list, but my colleague made the interesting suggestion of using the ‘My Links’ functionality of an account:

And then you can add it to your My Links list:

Which are shown on your My Links menu:

So there we’ve got one way of saving a search in SharePoint. In reality, there are a lot of alternative – Links lists being an obvious choice, but there are things like summary web parts too. Really, it’s anywhere you can store a URL.