I'm part way through the great book on Search Server 2008. Even using Sharepoint and Search every day, it's still interesting to find the things you don't know (or have forgotten ) about the products.

Some quick notes that I made while reading the book. They are in no particular order, other than I wrote them while reading so probably follow the chapters

If using a separate index server, make it also a Web Front End

The Search Service account will be granted read permissions in the farm and should not be part of the administrators

WSS Search (for searching Help) should be configured to crawl off peak. It only indexes the Help and runs a full crawl each time ?

Look carefully ate crawl impact rules for external sites and check the order of the rules

Schedule any full crawls to run after any daily backup jobs

Manage 'web site' content sources with custom properties and check the hop number (to avoid crawling the net) or set to 'this site only'

You can index Forms Based Authenticated sites using crawl rules and form credentials- point to the login page to crawl

Basic authentication is sent in clear text so implement SSL. You will need to specify the certificate?

You can specify a cookie

Ignore SSL warnings overcomes any self signed certificates

You can configure the Shared Services recently configured crawls web parts to suit your requirements

Search Scope can implement a custom property

Search result removal clears items from the index immediately and prevents explicit results being displayed

Search needs monitoring and management !!!!!!

Index will only do 16mb of a file

.one and .vsd files are not crawled by default and need additional iFilters

Beware of choosing stop / start services from Central Admin - this will clear the index and require a new full crawl