[Warning: I only have Hebrew SPS installations around, so if I make some mistakes when translating the menu options, try to guess what I meant :]

• Advanced Search Mode

Most of the features mentioned require Sharepoint to be in Advanced Search mode - this is enabled in the Site Settings -> Search Settings page.
SPS will ominously warn about the change being irreversible, but it is harmless - simply adds some more complexity to the Search administration screens.

• Crawling custom list items.

A default installation of SPS will automatically create a content index called Portal_Content, which indexes all the data stored in the SPS storage - this includes the main page, Portal Areas, listings, document libraries and custom lists saved in Areas.

For some reason, the default behavior when indexing lists is to crawl over all the items therein, but when searched to return the complete list as the search result, rather than the individual list item. I assume it's done for efficiency, or whatever. We'll often want to change that:

Go to Site Settings -> Search Settings -> Manage Indexes, edit the Portal_Content index and go to the Inclusion Rules page.
We'll see two rules grouped under a heading - the first is an Exclusion rule that prevents ASPX pages from being indexed, the second is the general Inclusion rule to index everything else.

Editing the inclusion rule properties will show two checkboxes that will enable custom item crawls - "Enable Alerts for Individual Items" and "Crawl individual list items". The problem is that they're both disabled.

I don't know why they are, but the solution is simple - erase the rule and recreate it.
Remember to make sure the rule is after the Exclusion rule, points at http://server:port/, and has the bottom two checkboxes set (Be careful - the fourth checkbox automatically sets the third too, so don't uncheck it by accident).

Now run an update on the index to make sure the custom list items are indexed.

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