Today I found a little problem when working with preconfigured server farm.  The farm had all the user profile services working and there were profiles with data – but no users were returned from search.

A quick look at the logs showed the error:

sps3://machinename  – Error in PortalCrawl Web Service

The problem was caused because the farm had been installed using the Farm Config Wizard  which had set things up to use the machine name for its default web application.  This web application was not being used and so had no site collections created.  The fix was to point the sps3:// url to a web application that did have a root site collection.

In my search for this solution I found some great posts that provide a lot of details about the issue and a combination of these will improve your knowledge of people search and also help you resolve the issue should you happen to have it.

Provides the solution that ultimately fixed my problem

http://trycatch.be/blogs/tom/archive/2007/05/15/people-crawl-error-in-portalcrawl-web-service.aspx

Provides information about a permission setting that was new to me

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/maximeb/archive/2009/10/27/error-in-portalcrawl-web-service-when-crawling-people-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Provides great info (albeit taken from the late great Patrick Tisseghem’s book (Inside the Index and Search Enginges:  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007  )

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/maximeb/archive/2009/10/27/error-in-portalcrawl-web-service-when-crawling-people-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx