While I was working at Intergen I was alerted to a small issue with configuring search keywords, best bets and synonyms. This simply being that they are set on a per site collection basis and there is no OOTB solution to share them. This has previously meant either using manual steps to ensure that your search settings are consistent across many site collections or the use of a product from Bamboo Solutions, sorry the name of the product escapes me at present, which is designed to do a whole lot more than just share search config.

Enter the Cross Site Collection Search Configurator a.k.a. CS2C. This solution is designed to allow you to share your site collection based search configuration between site collections in the same web application.

Currently the solution shares Keywords, Best Bets and Synonyms in a master and slave manner, that is using a new page in the Central Administration tool you set the Master Site Collection and then choose which site collections are to be slaves. This is coupled with a timer job which when activated against the web application runs hourly to synchronise all the Keywords, Best Bets and Synonym settings from the Master Site Collection to each of the Slave Site Collections.

Note: that currently if you manually set any Keywords etc. on a Slave Site Collection they will be lost when the timer job next runs.

This is definitely alpha software at this stage and although I've not found any bugs I'm sure they are lurking in there.

You can find the both the source code and a wsp over on CodePlex. Please be advised that this solution is built using Visual Studio 2008 and VSeWSS 1.2

At this stage my plans for future versions is to ensure that manual settings in Slave Site Collections are preserved, add support for sharing scopes across site collections and to improve the management screen.

Please do contact me if you have any feature requests, questions or comments.