Does anyone have any insight on how Magento handles Grouped Products in search? For example, if a site has products 1, 2, 3 inside of grouped product 4, when searching for a search term that is contained it product 3's description, would product 4 be returned by the search? If not, is there a way to alter this behavior?
The search indexers should concatenate all the searchable attributes for the grouped product and its associated/child products. You can verify this by looking at the data_index column in the catalogsearch_fulltext table. In your example for ID 4 you would see the descriptions and names of products 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Little hint is make keywords searchable and use search phrases or keywords to help build the search index. Works great for my site which has 50k items.
