***UPDATE***
Updated with content from Enterprise Search Deep-Dive Session.
Just attended the Enterprise Search Overview for SharePoint 2010 at SPC2009. It focused a lot around the FAST integration with SP2010. Below are some quick notes I took. Obviously I was not able to capture everything, but there is some cool new stuff coming out…
New Capabilities:
- Increased Scalability over MOSS 2007
- Multiple Crawlers
- Query: Partition and mirror the index
- Sub-second latency scaling to 100 Million documents
- Rich Content Processing
- Wizard driven installation
- Full Fault Tolerance
- Native 64-bit: hyper-v support
- Powershell Support
- SCOM support
- Full search reporting
Search Product Line:
- Search Server 2010 Express (Still Free)
- Basic Search
- SharePoint Server 2010
- Intranet-wide search, people and expertise search
- FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
- Visual experiences, extreme adaptability and Advanced Content Processing
Scalability:
- Multiple Indexers (Yes! True redundancy!)
- Indexers are stateless crawlers and do not store a copy of the index. They crawl, index, and immediately propagate to Query Servers.
- Index Partitioning
- Query Mirroring
- Multiple Property Databases
- Admin Database + Admin Component (equivalent of SSP database in MOSS)
- Crawl Distribution
- Built-in load balancer distributes hosts to crawl databases
- Crawlers crawl content that is covered by crawl database
- Default configuration can be overwritten using host distribution rules
- Query Distribution
- Low query latency if all index partitions are equal in size
- Distribution by hash of documentId
- Crawlers partitions indexed data and propagate to query servers
- Multiple scale-out options now, including multiple crawl databases on the same SQL server or multiple SQL servers
Engine Enhancements
- Support for regular expressions in Crawl Rules
- Native support for crawling case sensitive repositories
- Ability to prioritize Content Sources to distribute crawler resources
- New Crawl Policy to define how crawler treats error conditions
- Low indexing downtime (Search now only pauses for approx. an hour during backups)
Extensibility Enhancements
*Note: Protocol handler API still supported
- Change web part properties – no code
- Modify XSLT
- Modify config XML
- Refinement Panel – control metadata available for refinement
- Advanced Search – control metadata available for advanced search queries
- Extend OOB web parts programatically
- All OOB web parts are public (Sweet!)
- Connector Framework
- Support for attachments
- Item level security
- Crawl through entity associations
- Inline caching for better citizenships
- Richer crawl options
- Regular full crawl
- Time stamp based incremental crawl
- Change log crawl + deleted count
- Change log + delete log crawl
Ricker Manageability
- Consolidated admin UI dashboard
- Automated service password management through “managed accounts”
- PowerShell support for scripted administration
- Built-in system health monitoring, support for SCOM monitoring and alerting
- Built-in and extensible search analytics
Seach Site:
- Native Wildcard Search
- Type-ahead search box (aka Query Suggestions)
Search Results Page New Features:
- Metadata Extraction
- Refinement Panel
- Filtering by Results Type, Site, Author, Modified Date (displayed in a separate panel kind of like federated results)
- Suggested Searches
- Did you mean?
FAST – Search Results Page Additional New Features:
- Thumbnail of document appears with each result (This is awesome!)
- Preview documents within the search results window
- View in Browser Link
- Similar Results
- Refinement Panel (In addition to items listed above)
- Dynamically generate metadata from documentation for filtering (Metadata fields do not have to be populated first
- Rich Text Best Bets (including images)
- Federate Results directly to desktop
People Search:
- “Address Book Style” Search
- Phonetic name matching
- Nickname matching
- Refinement Panel
- Filtering on Focus, Job Title, Past Projects, Interests
- Vanity Search (Self Search) – When a user looks themselves up in People Search
- Help People Find Me Appears
- Results return the users profile seen by others in the search results. Also returns some metrics including the number of searches that led to them and keywords
- Help People Find Me Appears
- Additional Drill-down for Each User
- Browse in Organizational Chart
- View Recent Content
Connectors:
- Indexing Connectors
- Supports the OpenSearch Standard for Federation
Reporting and Administration:
- Greatly Refined
- Search Administration dashboard (looks much like the one added with MOSS 2007 SP2) is web part based and can be easily customized
- Error log reporting will now allow the administrator to select a specific item and decide whether to remove the item from the index or re-crawl.
There were also several web analytics enhancements for more robust reporting.
More later.
Jeff
Jeff Holliday