How To: create Keywords and Best Bets for MOSS Search programmatically

Yesterday I received an interesting question: a customer had the need to import several hundred keywords and related best bets programmatically to a couple of site collections.

And for sure he did not want to do this manually using the web UI.

I found the following solution for this problem:

SPSite spsite = new SPSite(“http://localhost:4007”);
SearchContext searchContext = SearchContext.GetContext(spsite);
Keywords keywords = new Keywords(searchContext, new Uri(“http://localhost:4007”));

// loop begin
Keyword myKeyword = keywords.AllKeywords.Create(“myKeyword”, DateTime.Now);
myKeyword.Synonyms.Create(“mySynonym”);
BestBet bestBet = myKeyword.BestBets.Create(“myBestBet”“my descript”new Uri(“http://www.myBestBetDestination.com”));
myKeyword.Update();
// loop end

http://localhost:4007 is the site collection where the code should add the the keywords and best bets to.

Where the loop is outlined you would need to implement a method to read the values from a file or database and then add each entry as a keyword.

17 Comments


  1. Hi Stefan,

    thanks a lot; this post saved us half a day of trial and error, I guess 🙂

    Regards, Matthias

    Reply

  2. Can you do the same in SPS 2003? (add keywords and best bets programatically)

    Reply

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  4. Thank you Stefan for this sample. We had over 1500 keywords, plus Synonyms on our site. This will reduce the effort from days to minutes.

    Reply

  5. Stefan,

    Since you can do this programmatically and it seems to bind to the SSP does this mean that you can set keywords (synonyms) and best bets at the SSP level for non-MOSS site searching? I’m curious because I have a MCMS 2002 site that we’re going to crawl with MOSS and we want to know if we can configure synonyms and best bets.

    Meaning, do you think I could do:

    SearchContext searchContext = SearchContext.GetContext(spsite);

    Keywords keywords = new Keywords(searchContext, new Uri("http://MYCMSSITE/"));

    // loop begin

    Keyword myKeyword = keywords.AllKeywords.Create("myKeyword", DateTime.Now);

    myKeyword.Synonyms.Create("mySynonym");

    BestBet bestBet = myKeyword.BestBets.Create("myBestBet", "my descript", new Uri("http://www.myBestBetDestination.com"));

    myKeyword.Update();

    Let me know what you think.

    Cale

    Reply

  6. Hi Cale,

    I haven’t tried it myself but I think this should also work for non portal content (e.g. MCMS sites).

    Give it a try!

    Cheers,

    Stefan

    Reply

  7. Ok, I’ll let you know how it goes. It sure would be interesting to find out. It’s too bad there isn’t an interface at the SSP level to set keywords by scope our source or something. Considering you can set authority pages at this level, it seems like it would have made sense to make the keyword interface at that level too.

    Reply

  8. You can administer keywords and best bets on the MOSS admin UI at Search keywords at Site Collection

    Reply

  9. How do you move keywords and best bets through different environments to get to production?

    From what I can find out, whilst the keywords and best bets are added within a site collection they are stored in the SSP database.

    The content deployment job for the site does not move the keywords to production. I’ve found some links saying how to export and import keywords but not easily move between environments with minimum effort.

    Reply

  10. Hi Chris,

    you need to follow the steps in the links you found.

    Cheers,

    Stefan

    Reply

  11. Hi Chris,

    sorry I did not try any of these personally so I cannot do a recommendation.

    Cheers,

    Stefan

    Reply

  12. Hi,

    I’ve setup Keywords and they seem to work fine.  However I’ve added a contact to receive an alert when the keywords come up for review but the contact doesn’t get any emails or alets.  I did some further investigations into this and apparently an alert should also go out to the contact when the keyword is initiall setup.  Has anyone ever got this to work?  I’ve tried this in all our environments but it doesn’t seem to work in any of them.

    Regards,

    Diran

    Reply

  13. Hi Stefan, I created the keywords and best bets using your code – thanks – and they appeared in the site collection as expected.

    However, I have a problem where they do not appear during a search. If I go into the keyword settings using the UI and just click OK without changing anything, they then appear in the search as normal.

    Any ideas?

    Reply

  14. Came across this problem myself.

    It seems that you need to use DateTime.UtcNow instead of DateTime.Now to enable the Keyword immediately, i.e.

    keywords.AllKeywords.Create("myKeyword", DateTime.UtcNow);

    Hope this helps.

    Reply

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