Today I ran into this problem at a client when I simply moved the indexing role over to a new server in the MOSS 2007 farm.  I first noticed the problem when I wanted to manually execute a full crawl in the farm because I had to rebuild the index when moving the role.  So I went into SSP admin site and clicked on search settings that is when I got hit with the error:

                “The search service is currently offline.  Visit the Services on Server page

in SharePoint Central Administration to verify whether the service is

enabled. This might also be because an indexer move is in progress.”

At first glance this error seemed right on because I did move the indexing role and I thought that SharePoint was just getting things aligned and I would be back up in no time.  About an hour past and I tried it again and received the same error this is when I suspected that something was definitely wrong.  So I went through the initial steps:

1.        Stop and start search services on new index server and all servers running the query role

2.       Then restarted the search service via central administration under operations tab>>Services

3.       Went into Services.msc and found the Office Search Service and restarted it manually

4.       Checked to make sure that the search service account had correct rights to SQL.

None of this seemed to work.  Finally I was able to resolve this problem by:

1.        Going into the SSP settings (clicking on SSP administration not the SSP link itself) within the left quick launch navigation from within central administration.

2.       Selecting the dropdown arrow next to the SSP where I was having the search issue

3.       Select edit properties

4.       Within the properties screen of the SSP look for the “Process accounts”

5.       Make sure that your search account is in there!

Once I added the search account there I was then able to access the search settings page within SSP admin without a problem.  Hope this helps everyone who might run into the same issue!

Cheers,