I was configuring the people search and found this article which explains it in great detail.

Basically you need to go to SSP: User Profile and Properties : Configure Profile Import. Once you’ve set this up here you then click on Start full Import to pull them in. You can set a schedule here too to crawl it in at required rate, I'm not sure of the performance issues as yet if you do this frequently but imagine it'd be quite high!

I did add some new AD users and crawled them in, they all appear in the User Profiles within the Central Administration console.

But, if I do a people search for them they do not appear.

This was a great article on custom configuring the Import Connections for Active Directory. I ran this on command prompt to show a search for 'gareth*' in the system:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>ldifde -f c:\usersindomain.txt -r "(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User)(cn=gareth*))

and it returned:

Connecting to "awhsvsp01.AWDEMO.COM.AU"
Logging in as current user using SSPI
Exporting directory to file c:\usersindomain.txt
Searching for entries...
Writing out entries.
1 entries exported

The command has completed successfully

So it returned the result I was after.

I also had a look at the Scope Properties and Rules for the 'People Search' scope:

It states that there are 35 people in there which is correct.

So I'm really not sure what is up here! I've been reading a bit around the web, but there doesn't seem to be much out there on this feature of SharePoint. I've even flicked through the books I have and they don't appear to be in there either!

Removing People