Search in SharePoint

As hungry for any bit of additional info concerning the upcoming SharePoint 2010 as the community is, in a pre-SharePoint-conference world, we have to make do with the scarce bits and pieces we have been offered by Microsoft. The Sneak Peek is what it is – just a peek, but there are some things an informed visitor can project to form a rough silhouette of the future make of the leading ECM system. My guesstimation is that search is one of the more important parts of that silhouette.

It has been a while since Microsoft announced their intention to enhance search in SharePoint 2010 by leveraging FAST ESP (which is quite promising, if not surprising – the FAST Search & Transfer team went on to form a considerable part of Microsoft’s Enterprise Search Group right after the 2008 takeover). Hopefully, the improvements via the FAST technologies will run deep enough for the user to actually tell, in areas ranging from taxonomy management to consistent Boolean search.

In fact, early opportunities to get the feel of these search technologies have been around for quite a while already, namely the FAST ESP web parts for SharePoint 2007 at Codeplex. This does indicate that effort on making the two work together has been going on from the very outset, but apart from this, it is difficult to make assumptions of any kind at the moment – not before the community is handed the actual solution, with bells and whistles on it.

Speculations aside, there’s some more to efficient SharePoint search. The last day of summer saw Surfray announce Ontolica 4.0, a search solution which now includes a Search Intelligence module, thus making Ontolica a two-in-one search offering featuring both a different approach to search as such and what I would call search metadata, i.e. search effectiveness analytics and reporting. The module can track search patterns throughout a given SharePoint deployment and generate both out-of-the-box and customized reports. Additionally, there is Ontolica 4.0 Express available for Microsoft Search Server Express.

With all the search customization options, all this is a fairly satisfactory start. Even for now, while 2010 is not here yet, as well as all the goodies it may bring.