Facing the dreaded “Your query is malformed. Please rephrase your query.” when using FS4SP scopes

You read Jørgen’s great blog post and learned that scopes in FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP) are simply FQL (FAST Query Language) filters, so you followed the instructions and created your own scopes with a command more or less like this:

New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryScope -SearchApplication "FASTQuery" -Name FASTContosoScope -Description "Scope for FAST Contoso content source" -DisplayInAdminUI 1 -ExtendedSearchFilter "contentsource:FAST Contoso"

After compiling your scope and everything, you try to use it in a search center and instead of results you get this message:

Your query is malformed. Please rephrase your query.

Your query seems to be fine and you don’t see what could be wrong, but there is a small detail you overlooked. Since “FAST Contoso” is a query with multiple terms, you need to use double quotes around it to be considered a proper FQL query. Now how can you do that if you are already using double quotes to define the ExtendedSearchFilter parameter in the PowerShell command?

The trick here is to use single quotes on the outside to define the ExtendedSearchFilter parameter and double quotes on the inside to define the FQL query with multiple terms:

$scope = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryScope –SearchApplication "FASTQuery" -Identity "FASTContosoScope"
$scope.Filter = 'contentsource:"FAST Contoso"'
$scope.Update()

Don’t forget that you need to compile your scope again to be able to test it immediately, by clicking on “Start update now” at the entry page for the FASTQuery SSA:

After these steps you show get your results normally without any problems when using your scope. Cheers!

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