A couple of things that I've found that stop the WSS search  from
working. The problem is sometimes to do with the Microsoft Search
service, we had a situation where we had rebooted the SQL server and
the service had logged on with different credentials to previously so
we had to reset them and restart the service. More often, I've found
that finding the Full-Search Catalog for the relevant SP database in
SQL Enterprise Manager and rebuilding it sorts out the problem.

I'm not an expert on these things so someone else may tell me that I
should never rebuild the catalog but it's worked for me.

Rebuilding the full-text catalog for the SITE database fixed the
problem.

Not a search  expert but it looks like either your indexing isn't setup
correctly or perhaps the content that it is trying to index is "excluded
by the server because of a no-index attribute". I don't know how a
no-index attribute for a URL is set, but if you unset it perhaps the
search results you are expecting will return.

can SP 2007 be configured to index also all older versions of a doc
on per document library basis, may be only major versions? If so, how
will the search  result be presented to users, one record per version if
it matches the search criteria. If not, is it on Microsoft's radar
screen at all?

I believe MOSS 2007 will search  all versions. To limit the versions
returned in a search, simply remove the ability (permission) from the search
content access account from reading anything but the last major version.

I was always under the impression that MOSS 2007
only indexes and return the latest version. So the follow up questions
are:

1) If a keyword exists in all 10 versions of a doc, does search  result
display all 10 results on 10 different lines
2) On the permission aspect, you seem to imply that there is a way to
specify different ACL's for different versions. I did not know this
exists and thought it might make life very complicated to keep track of
which users have access to which versions.

Could you elaborate these a bit more?

Because we have item level permissions, different ACLs can be assigned
to different documents in the same library. What is seen in the result
set is partially dependent on the view/read permissions assigned at the
doc lib level for viewing minor versions. But to be clear, by default,
MOSS 2007 indexes *all* content and will return any version that matches
the query, security and viewing configurations of the person executing
the query.

I appreciate your clarification. I understand the item level permission
but have not seen version level permission before. Can you confirm if
the following is true?

A doc has 2 main versions:

1. Version 1: with unique keyword xxx and user 1 does not have any
access, user 2 and 3 have read access
2. Version 2: with unique keyword yyy and user 2 does not have
access but user 1 and 3 have read access

If user 1 searches for keyword xxx, the doc is NOT returned.

If user 2 searches for keyword xxx, version 1 is returned.

If user 3 searches for keyword xxx, version 1 is returned

If user 1 searches for keyword yyy, version 2 is returned.

If user 2 searches for keyword yyy, the doc is NOT returned.

If user 3 searches for keyword yyy, version 2 is returned.

Does the first 3 cases depend on if we configure MOSS 2007 to also index
the prior versions using the app pool service account (and there is
version-specific permission)? If not (or out of the box), only the next
3 cases would happen.

No - version-level permissions is not dependent on the metadata values
entered. It is more generic than that. What it means is that you
either have permissions to view draft versions or you don't. It is set
in the doc lib's configuration values.

Yes, you can configure this scenario by creating a site  path
rule that assigns the application pool account as the default content
access account for that site path rule. The App Pool account has Uber
Rights that do not appear in the security interface and that is not,
frankly, documented anywhere except now in this post. This will ensure
that all documents - both major and minor versions - are crawled and
indexed. Of course, the documents that appear in the result set are
dependent on the permissions that are assigned at the doc library level
to see/view/read minor versions.