The first time ColdFusion Server was installed, it crashed/timed out.  So we rebooted and uninstalled it.  We reinstalled and everything looked okay.  When we went into the Coldfusion Administrator and tried to create a new collection, we were presented with an error:

Unable to retrieve collections from the Search Service.
Please verify that the ColdFusion Search Server is installed and running

After looking around, the main suggestions were:

1. for Coldfusion MX 7 users was to re-install ColdFusion and it should work.  Okay.  Reinstalled about 8 times, no luck or progress.  I tried it for CF 8 and it didn’t improve.  I did receive a report from one of our developers that he did solve this very problem on CF8 by reinstalling so it might be worth one or two tries, but no more.
2. Download the Verity installer from www.adobe.com/go/verity. You have to enter your CF serial number.  Only drawback is that it seems you need a ColdFusion MX 7 serial number to download it, and the search services that get installed are MX 7 and not 8.
3. This is what worked for me: Run the verity-install batch file located inside your /verity folder where you have ColdFusion installed..  On our server it took a few minutes to run, spewed out a few errors due to a likely partial installation, or partial uninstall, however it ended up creating the “ColdFusion 8 Search services” in the Control Panel > Services.

You might also be interested in the Adobe technote about this for ColdFusion MX 7.

One other thing to note is that the Verity Search services install on an incrementing port number.  So for  ColdFusion MX 7 the install port was 9550.  For ColdFusion 8, the installation port was 9551 and so on.. Likely a good way to run multiple versions of ColdFusion on one server without conflict, good thinking!