New SP2010 Search Capabilities Overview

There are a number of significant search capabilities that SharePoint 2010 offers, along with the other products in the series. As always there is a lot of information out there but here at SPBAHQ we want to give you the official cheat sheet to get you up and running quickly In the upcoming weeks there will be a more detailed analysis of the these features in the future.

Infrastructure Changes

• Multiple Indexers: Can have more than one machine indexing content for fresher results and more scale.
• Crawl Databases: No more index servers, now there is the concept of stateless crawlers that store crawl information in a database. You can have multiple cralwers for each database, and multiple databases thereby having multiple crawler groups.
• Partitioned Index’s: Each Query server no longer has a full copy of the index, indexes are now partitioned across each Query server.
• Multiple Property Databases: Can add additional property databases
• Admin Database: All administration information is stored in admin database
• Host Distribution Rules: Can associated a hostname with a crawl database (and hence a crawler)
• Regular Expressions for Crawl Rules: Can now use regex to specify crawl rules.

Indexing Scale

• SharePoint Foundation: up to 10 million items
• Search Server Express 2010 single install: 300,000 if used with SQL Server Express, otherwise 10 million
• Search Server 2010: 100 million
• SharePoint Server 2010: 100 million
• FAST Search Server for SharePoint: 1 billion items

End User Changes

New Search Query Capabilities

• Boolean Operators: Now supporting AND, NOT and OR operators in search.
  • ‘ “SharePoint BA” OR SPBAHQ ‘
• Wildcard Searching: Prefix matching support for both keywords and properties
  • ‘ Mana* author:Micha* ‘
• Improved Operator Support: Support for operators over range refinements. Can use queries to return all documents between two date ranges for instance.
  • =, >, <, <=, >=
• Suggestions while typing: Interactive suggestions when a user is typing in the search box, taken from past user queries which are stored in the user query logs.
• Suggestions after query has run: Now the search center will also provide suggestions after a user has searched, this is not the same as the ‘Did you mean’ feature though
• Improved ‘Did you mean‘ feature: These suggestions will actually be taken from the search index lexicon so you will be guaranteed to get a result back on a ‘Did you mean’ suggestion
• Search Connectors: Can now create a connector straight to windows 7 allowing users to search from the desktop.

New Search Results Capabilities

• Refinement Panel: Probably the biggest and most welcome change from a user’s perspective. Users can now easily drill down into search results without the need for custom coding (or the
• View In Browser Link: If Office Web Apps are installed users can view content directly from the search results
• Social Tags Click Through: If a term appears in the document and has a social tag attached with that term it will be promoted higher
• Improved Snippets: Snippet quality is significantly improved, less low-noise summaries
• People Matched on default search page: In the default search result page people results will appear in the results (this is actually a Federated search with the people scope)
• Connectors for Windows 7: You now have the ability to search SharePoint directly from Windows 7
• Social Search Capabilities: Email mining to bootstrap profiles with interests and colleagues, Phonetic Searches, Nickname matching
• Social Search Driving Results: Click through behaviour drives ranking, query suggestions mines from logs
• Self-Search: See how my profile has helped people find the user, will show the keywords that people are using to find us

FAST Search Server Capabilities

The FAST Search Server product is a new product that can give advanced search capabilities to SharePoint 2010.

• Document Thumbnails: Word and PowerPoint presentations can be viewed directly from within search results
• Visual Best Bets: Best bets can be configured to contain rich interactive elements
• Sort on Managed Properties: Users can sort on any managed property within a FAST results page (standard search only allow sorting by date or relevance)
• Similar Results: A link is provided to similar results for greater search clarity.
• Result Collapsing: Documents that are identical (have identical checksum) will be shown as collapsed and will have the ability to expand the results and see all versions of the result
• Relevancy Tuning By Document or Site Promotion: Within a FAST search results page users can choose to promote items with the result set that will then increase the visibility of the item when another search occurs.
• Synonyms: SharePoint 2010 allows for one way synonyms, FAST extends this concept to allow for one and two way synonyms.
• Property Extraction: This automatically pulls key information such as company and people from item and create properties. This is really, really cool!
• Rank Profiles: Allow administrators to change the ranking algorithm by adjusting how much weight is given to attributes such as freshness, proximity, authority, rank and other attributes.

Product Capabilities Table

The table above details the capabilities that the new search products now offer.

Links

• Whats new in Enterprise Search (SharePoint Server 2010): Microsoft TechNet article describing some of the new changes
• TechNet Enterprise Search Center: All you need to know about Enterprise search from TechNet

Tags: cheat sheet, search

Category: Planning, Requirements and Analysis