SharePoint 2010 - Enterprise Search

Definition 1: Finding relevant Information

Definition 2– Finding nouns, phrases, statements

Activities involved in Search: Sorting with appropriate data, metadata, security and Query handling

Technical Definition: One of the enterprise features provided as part of SP server which helps to craw, index and handle query on various data sources to retrieve relevant information user needs.

Technically Search = Crawling, indexing and query handling.

What are the Search products available to use?

1.       Search server express license free product

2.       Search Server Enterprise edition

3.       Search Server for SP

4.       Search server for SP internet sites

5.       Fast Search Server

6.       Fast Search Server for SP

What are the Search products available to use?

1.       Various content   sources support

2.       Incremental crawling support

3.       Incremental and adaptive indexing support.

4.       Scalable configuration in search topologies

5.       IFilter API support for custom file/document format

6.       Crawl rules to define how crawl should work.

7.       Search support for narrowing down the sources

8.       Server name mapping support to transform indexed data to different url in the result

9.       Meta data property search

10.   Host distribution rule support to configure where to store indexed data in appropriate databases.

11.   Authoritative page support for promoting demoting url/content sources

12.   Federated search support for integrating external search providers

13.   Key words based best beds(recommendations/suggestions)

14.   Inbuilt support to “did you mean suggestions”

15.   Profile support for people search.

16.   SQL connecter support in search using BCS

17.   Out of the box search web-parts(Extensible)

18.   XSLT based search customization

19.   Search result refinement panel for filtering(not a nested search)

20.   XML dictionary based thesaurus

21.   Multi-lingual dictionary support

22.   SOM support for programmatic access

23.   Windows 7 explorer integration for search

24.   Wild card search

25.   Boolean operator supporting search (And or NOT etc.)

26.   Phonetics search using soundx

27.   Search alert support

28.   RSS and ATOM feed format support in Search results

29.   Search analytical report based on search query logging.

30.   In built support to search statistics and search summary

31.   Out of the box support to search pagination.

Features of FAST Search

1.       Performance centric solution for Enterprise centric sites

2.       Completely customizable and extensible because it uses pipe line based processing in crawling and indexing

3.       Context based search support(Area specific)

4.       Visual best bed and preview support

5.       Digital media assets and properties support in search.

6.       Nested search support

7.       Text mining based algorithms for relevant search(fussy lookup and grouping in finding related keywords and terms)