Henri's blogg

With Office Web App configured you have automatic preview of documents, you have refiners, and that funky little date refiner down left. The search results are much improved and have much of the FAST search engine implemented.

It's easy to setup, and there are others that covers this much better.

For some guidance on initial setup try:

Technet: Create a Search Center site in SharePoint Server 2013 or this

How-to-configure-search-centre-in-sharepoint-2013

But there are two tiny options I want to mention:

When you create your Search Center site collection, first stop by Central Admin, Application Management -Manage Web Applications. Select your default SharePoint 80 Web app, and Managed Paths

Then Add a new Explicit path named search:

This is just for a nice short url for your search center, and it looks more professional.

You are now ready to create your Search center Site Collection .

Go to Application Management - Create Site Collections, and fill in a nice Title such as Search.

In the Web site Address section, Url, you can now select search in the dropdown,

Leave the last part of the url empty.

Further down in Template selection,  select Enterprise tab and Enterprise search center.

Fill in an administrator and leave the other settings as default.

Now you are ready to fill in global search center url.

Head on into Central Admin again, Application management and select Manage service applications.

Select Search Service Application

On the new page coming up there you have Global Search Center Url. 

Change it to the url you just created, but first look closely on the instructions on the page:

As you can see you have to add /pages to your Search center url. 

So in our example: http://[yourserver]/search/pages

Not just http://[yourserver]/search as you might think.

And as you might have noticed in the image, if you have another translation installed, you have to use the localized name for pages.

It might seem like a lot to do, but it will probably take you 5 minutes to set up.

And when you have search center up and working, you will never turn back.

Watch out for the next post regarding Search Refiners, specifically how to set up 

Content Type search refiners. 

Until then.