People search errors when My Site is running on SSL

This was a great gotcha that I picked up duing a client project handover.

They reported issues with search, and I found a load of errors in the crawl logs regarding accessing the mysite.

You will find that this issue occurs when you configure your My Sites to run under SSL (HTTPS), and the problem is that the People Search isn't really interested in the My Site content, it is actually interested in the Profile Database (which is another thing most people forget to switch on .. make sure your Profile Database has an import schedule setup!)

Basically, you need to set the Content Source URL to the following:

sps3s://<mysiteurl>/

So if your mysite is running under https://mysite.company.com/ then you need to set your Content Source URL to:

sps3s://mysite.company.com/

Personally I found this pretty confusing, so I actually  split out the Profile Database content into a separate Content Source, and configured the People Scope to only retrieve items from that specific Content Source.

Happy searching!

Update

Just a quick update, because this is another "People Search" problem. Even if you don't use My Sites, you should still switch on and use the MySite web application and settings (You can stop people from creating "My Sites" by disabling Self Service Site Creation at the Web Application level).

The reason is that the My Site web application is used for People Search URLs and will automatically dsiplay information from the Profile Database (which is basically the user's "public profile") even if they don't have a My Site created!