Search in SharePoint 2010

Yet again Microsoft really listened to everybody using SharePoint in some way. We all know search wasn't really that good and so Microsoft also invested a lot of resources in this area.

In this entry I will only talk about search in SharePoint Server 2010. Besides that you also have the FAST Search Server 2010 which I will talk about tomorrow. This is the high end search version.

Microsoft has included new search web parts and developers will be happy to hear that these are all public. This means you can extend them in any way you want. They also provided a connectors framework to use the search on different kinds of content sources.
The search infrastructure is a lot more scalable (support for up to one billion items) and support for mirroring and partitioning.

The end user UI
* You have the click through behavior, heavily supporting on relevance. The technology behind relevance has also been improved.
* More support for multiple languages.
* Syntax: you can use boolean operators for free text and properties, prefix matching, bigger than, smaller than, ... .
* You can see the 'Related Searches' which comes from mining the search log.

Search is social
Social behavior drives the search quality. When people start to tag and rate content it will have a dramatic influence on what results will be returned after a search.

Infrastructure
In SharePoint 2007 you could have multiple query servers but just one indexing server. This was really a single point of failure.
In SharePoint 2010 you can now have multiple indexers, the crawlers are stateless so they can for example pick up where on other crawled stopped, you can better distribute your crawling, the index can be mirrored and partitioned, crawling supports regular expressions as what to crawl and what not, you can prioritize the content sources, there are crawl policies and you can easily backup and restore your search infrastructure.

Extendability
* In SharePoint you configure your search
* In SharePoint Designer you will extend the search and define connectors
* In Visual Studio you will be able to use the object model and the public web parts to really build your own search.

UI
It's all about XSLT and XML so rather easy to manipulate. I would really take a look at the SharedQueryManager class.
There is a chart web part, a popular queries web part and a refinement panel.

Management
* As with the other things in SharePoint it can be controlled using PowerShell.
* You have the search dashboard which is the central configuration place.
* You can see lots of 'logging information' in the form of graphs.
* You can have an overview of the top queries.