As promised this is a follow up to SharePoint Search is not Psychic, In this article I hope to briefly cover a few of the ways you can start to influence you search. I don't intend to discuss search scopes or managed properties in this article.
Authoratative sites/pages
The concept behind Authoritative sites is making a site more prominent in the search results. For example, you have an Intranet which is a single Web Application and single Site collection; within this you have a site called Processes - this site contains important information about processes, procedures and forms in your business. You find people keep copying these and creating their own versions of them. This means that users searching come across uncontrolled out-of-date copies. By making the Process site an authoritative site it tends to be a the top of the search results. In Central Admin under Shared Service Provider, choose Search Settings and scroll to the bottom, choose Specify authoritative pages, then simply enter the URL.
Keywords/Synomns
The concept behind keywords is to offer alternative words to search for. E.g. If you had a business name ABD and it changed its name to ABCD then you could add a keyword for ABCD to offer ABD as an alternative. This helps with content that has not been update from the original name.
Best bets
Best bets are a quick way of ensuring that a user searching for a specific term, gets a specific result returned at the top. E.g. You specific that the specific term "forms" should return to a specific url. This will offer this result at the top of the search results.
Search result removal
Not something I have used much but if a URL is included that you need to remove quickly. Enter the URL in the search result removal Page (under search settings), it will be removed instantly and a crawl rule will be added so it doesn't appear back in the index after the next crawl. To reverse this action you will need to delete the crawl rule that has been added and start a crawl.
Useful articles
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA100478321033.aspx
This aricle applies to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, although if you want to do this with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 then check out Microsoft's Search Server offering...