Central Admin

Are some of your links in Central Admin missing?  Here are two article that might help.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jorman/archive/2010/07/10/missing-links-or-access-denied-in-central-admin-sharepoint-2010.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981592

SharePoint Search Refinement

Enterprise search administration (SharePoint Server 2010)
Enterprise search management includes the following tasks:

• Configure enterprise search (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Manage farm-level search settings (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Manage Search service applications (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Manage crawling (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Manage queries and results (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Manage metadata properties for search (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Manage people search (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Monitor search (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Manage settings to improve search results (SharePoint Server 2010)

FAQ
If a Web Part contains different levels of security for example reference to items with both general and admin permissions, the content of the web part will not be available for search. This behavior can be changed in Site Action > Site Settings > Search and Offline Availability by changing the Indexing ASPX Page Content setting.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff453905.aspx