The STS3S protocol is used for crawling SharePoint content that is exposed using SSL, without having to have URL links that lead to every possible content item in the web site. This protocol is used to index WSS 3.0 server farms using SSL (which MOSS 2007 is layered on top of ) STS3S protocol achieves this by using the Site Data Web service to determine all the content in your SharePoint site.
Some examples:
sts3s://www.yourdomain.com/
sts3s://www.yourdomain.com/teamsites/
sts3s://portal.yourdomain.com/
The protocol handlers (that ship out-of-the-box with MOSS 2007) translate the content source url from sts3s:// into a web service call sts3s://www.yourdomain.com is actually crawled on the web front end by the indexer using a SOAP call to the web service https://mysite.yourdomain.com/_vti_bin/spscrawl.asmx ( the STS3S SOAP call is made using HTTP protocol on TCP Port 56738 with SSL encryption )
Read more at the source about this and other protocols.
Tags: User Profiles, webservice
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