FAST Search in SharePoint 2010

Search in SharePoint 2007 wasn't really that good and therefore Microsoft did some big investment in this area. With the acquisition of FAST, Microsoft took a huge leap forward in Search technology. It is this search that Microsoft integrated in the SharePoint architecture to give the end user a better (far more better) search experience.

Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 is a separate product which is installed on a different server and is then hooked up into SharePoint. It is a superset of the SharePoint Server Search.

Visual, conversational search
When you perform a search with fast, the results are much more clearer than in SharePoint 2007. You get a teaser of the complete information, you see metadata and thumbnails. Most people think visually and remember a document or a presentation because they saw a certain page or slide. The thumbnail provides this information. For PowerPoint presentations, you can dive into the document directly from within the search results.

On the left you have the refiners which let you refine your results using metadata, relevancy and in case of a people search you can use stuff like 'Job Title' or 'Expertise'.
Sorting can also be applied so you can see the newest documents or the documents from a certain source.
On the right you have federation and people results.

Context
Search is very subjective. A sales person will probably want to know other things about a certain subject than a developer. FAST knows this and will show different results based on the role of the current person. Roles can be set by system admins and can be read from the user profile.
On the top you have your 'Visual Best Bet' which is some kind of a banner (image) which represents your best bet.

Control of user experience
The system admin has control over what features the user can use. For example, he can turn off 'sorting'. They can even create keywords which create a connection between for example ERP and 'Enterprise Resource Planning' so FAST knows it has to look for the same information. This can also be automated from a SharePoint list. This is also ideal for integrating corporate taxonomy.

FAST vs SharePoint Search
There are a lot of common things like 'Social Search' but FAST really has some very interesting additional stuff. Of course you have to always compare both ways to decide what you really need for the environment you are facing.
FAST has more lingual support, deeper refinement, visual search, thumbnails, Visual Best Bet, context search, metadata extraction, ... .
This last one is something cool as well. FAST will extract new metadata our of your data during the crawling process. This allows for more accurate search and relevancy.

IT Pro's
System admins have a lot of control about the complete process. They can map Managed Properties, they can automate everything with PowerShell (over 200 commandlets), they can monitor and see alerts in the System Center, ... .
It's good to know you should invest a lot of time in learning PowerShell. A lot of SharePoint can be controlled this way, it's much faster than stsadm and sometimes you can do things that can only be done with PowerShell !

Developers
Developers also have a lot control in the way search happens and how the user experiences it. The out of the box search web parts are all public and therefore extendable, the content processing is configurable and extendable, you can use FQL (FAST Query Language) to do all kinds of cool stuff with the data, you can build custom rank models, you can use the Query Object Model, ... . As you can see, the possibilities are endless.