Add Custom Scope to SharePoint Search Dropdown using PowerShell

Requirement: We’ve created a custom search scope “Search All Documents” in SharePoint Central Admin and would like to include it in search scope drop downs of few site collections.

SharePoint: Add search scope to drop-down
Well, it’s a few clicks job to include custom search scopes to search drop down in SharePoint. Here is how:

1. Go to Site Actions >> Site Settings
2. Click on “Search Scopes” link under Site collection administration
3. Click on the “Display Groups” link and choose “Search Dropdown”

   

4. From here, we can include/exclude any scopes to search dropdown by simply selecting/deselecting check-boxes.

Add a custom scope to SharePoint Search Scope Dropdowns using PowerShell

While it’s not tedious to customize search scope dropdowns by following the above steps for a few sites, We had to do it for all site collections under a particular managed path. (around 50!). Here is the PowerShell script to add custom search scopes to the SharePoint search dropdown:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

#Set these three variables accordingly
$SiteURL  = "https://sharepoint.crescent.com/sites/operations/"
$CustomSearchScopeName = "Search All Documents"
$DisplayGroupName = "Search Dropdown"

#Get the Site Object
$Site= Get-SPSite $siteURL

#Initialize 
$SearchContext= [Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchContext]::GetContext($site)
$Scopes= New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.Scopes($searchContext)

#Get the Display Group 
$SearchDropdownDisplayGroup =  $scopes.GetDisplayGroupsForSite($SiteURL) | Select-Object -First 1
#Get the custom scope
$CustomSearchScope = $Scopes.GetSharedScope($CustomSearchScopeName)

#Add custom scope to Display group
$SearchDropdownDisplayGroup.Add($CustomSearchScope)
$SearchDropdownDisplayGroup.Update()
 

See the result in action: