I’ll be the first to tell you that Alternate Access Mapping confuses the heck out of me. It does not do what I think it should do and it affects things I think it should not affect. I guess my main complaint is the name and not the function. Anyway, here is a fix to a problem that I have seen in several implementations that use an extended web application.
The configuration is a common one for an authoring environment and “production” web site that are hosted on the same web application. We often create an authoring environment first then create the www site by extending the authoring environment and mapping it to authoring. We then allow anonymous on the www site and lock it down with a read only policy. In this way authoring.doghousetoys.com and www.doghousetoys.com serve the same content, but only www is public.
The problem is when we search the www site from another web application like blogs.doghousetoys.com the results are rendered with the authoring URL.
Server Name Mapping
Server Name Mapping is not the solution, because the server names and protocols are all correct for the content source. I am working on another article that uses server name mapping for our internal video search. The purpose is to crawl the content on a file share (file://) and then serve the results as streaming media (mms://). So I use a server name mapping from file://server to mms://server. That is not the problem here.
Alternate Access Mapping
The issue has to do with the AAM setting that resulted from creating the authoring site first which put authoring into the default zone. When I created www I placed it into the Internet zone.
Use the Edit Public URLs button to switch the zones for your sites.
The results should look like this:
Now your results should all be rendered from the correct zone.
I hope this helps! I did not figure this one out on my own. I got the answer from the wonderful Microsoft Product Group team members. The thing I love about working and playing in the SharePoint community is the COMMUNITY! The Product Group is passionate about the product and the success of the folks using the product. THANKS!