SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search Overview

There are three major SharePoint 2010 search products

1) Search Server Express
2) SharePoint Server 2010 Search
3) FAST Search Server

There are parallel tracks for the SharePoint Search and the FAST search. These are two separate options with distinct differences. The following are features of the new SharePoint Search:

1) Auto complete functionality is built in to the search box. As soon as you start typing, choices appear in the same way you see on Google.
2) The results page is not just a list of results as in 2007. On the left side of the page is the search refinement area where metadata extracted from the items to create a set of facets that categorize the results.
3) These facets can also be represented as a tree view so that users can drill into facets and sub facets.
4) Users can navigate over the result set by result type: web pages, file types,
Author, Modified Date, Sites are available facets out of the box.

Other notable new search features:

1) Federation to the desktop.
2) Social behavior improves search results relevance by processing the click-through rate and the document rating as part of the relevance ranking.
3) Wildcard search now included OOB.

People Search

1) You can now search for people even if you remember only part of the name.
2) People search results can be refined by Job Type: i.e. Salesperson or refined by Expertise, Past Projects (e.g. Market Analysis, Lean Project Management), Interests, Schools. Any custom metadata for the profile can be used, including My Sites data including Colleagues. Search results allow users to determine who created the most content of a certain type, an important point in evaluating the value of the content.
4) There is a link to Update my keywords which allows you to determine what are the keyword searches that lead to your profile. This helps determine what keywords should you put in your profile so that people can find you.
5) Users can scroll through PP slides directly form the search results screen.

Visual best bets

1) Federated results, including federation to the desk top.
2) Previews of the some document types built in to the search results.

Search Infrastructure

Significant changes have been made to the search services. The basic thrust is to componentize the indexing infrastructure, removed bottlenecks due to the single mega-index structure used in 2007. In particular, the index has been divided into partitions. "An index partition represents a portion of the entire index, and therefore the index is the aggregation of all index partitions. Partitioning the index allows different portions of the index to be spread across query servers. Administrators decide on the number and configuration of each of the partitions."

1) Unlike the current version, Multiple crawlers can be used to crawl different content simultaneously.
2) Search performance is much improved with subsecond latency scaling to 100M documents.

Connectors

1) Though they didn't mention an OOB connector to Documentum, they emphasized that it was easy to connect to Documentum using the new connector architecture. I'm going to investigate this as much as possible over the next few days. The long hunt for the best solution to Documentum and SharePoint integration may be closer.
2) SharePoint now can connect to any source that supports OpenSearch interface
3) Asset Management Systems were mentioned as system

Manageability

1) Consolidated dashboard.
a. Can access items directly in the crawl log
b. Query latency statistics help refine response time
c. The number of queries
d. Search queries and the number of results
2) Advanced Content Processing
a. Custom extraction of content
b. Crawl properties
c. Managed properties can be made into sort, query, or refiner properties by checkbox

3) Search configurations
a. Web Parts are now open can be extended
b. The search platform can support the fusion of structured and unstructured content
c. The presenter showed a project application that allowed users to add people and documents directly into their workspace from the search results screen and they were able to build presentations directly in the workspace from search results.
e. The search platform by itself appears to be an outstanding application platform