Transcript Introduction to Enterprise Search

Introduction to Enterprise Search
Corey Roth
Blog: www.dotnetmafia.com
Twitter: twitter.com/coreyroth
Corey Roth
• Consultant for Stonebridge
• Worked in Consumer Electronics, Travel, Advertising, and
Energy industries
• Currently doing SharePoint development specializing in
Enterprise Search
• Microsoft Award for Customer Excellence (ACE) Winner
• MCTS: MOSS 2007 Configuring, Developer
• E-mail: [email protected]
• Twitter: twitter.com/coreyroth
• Blog: www.dotnetmafia.com
What is Enterprise Search?
It helps you find your stuff…
What is Enterprise Search?
• Enterprise Search is one of Microsoft’s current offerings to
do search in the Enterprise
• Included in MOSS 2007
• Also available as a stand alone product (Search Server 2008 /
Search Server Express)
• Allows for indexing and querying of documents from
multiple sources (i.e.: documents, web sites, file shares,
Active Directory (people), databases, web services, etc.)
Components of Enterprise Search
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Content Sources
Crawled Properties
Managed Properties
Scopes
File Types
Crawl Rules
Content Sources
• Defines what is being crawled
• Configure a crawl for SharePoint, Web Sites, File Shares,
Active Directory, etc.
• Specifies a full and incremental crawl schedule
• Can manually start crawls here
Search Center
• Out of the box site and web parts for searching and
displaying results
• Can be created using the Site Settings menu on the root web
site by enabled certain features
• Search Results can be customized using XSLT
• Supports keyword search only for now (no wildcard) – For
wildcard search alternative see
wildcardsearch.codeplex.com
Metadata Properties
• After a full crawl, Crawled Properties are created for any
metadata discovered (i.e.: Site Columns, Columns in a
database, etc.)
• Properties can be of type text, integer, decimal, date / time,
boolean
• Only text properties are included in the index by default
• Managed Property - a property that can be queried on or
displayed on the results page
• One or more Crawled Properties can be mapped to a
Managed Property
• Managed Properties can be used to define scopes
Scopes
• Scopes allow you to predefine subsets of the search index
using rules
• Rules can be created by web address, content source, or
managed property query (i.e.: Color:”Red”)
• Scopes can be grouped together in Scope Display Groups for
use in the Search Center
Search Center – Web Parts
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SearchBoxEx
CoreResultsWebPart
BestBets
Paging
AdvancedSearch
Search Center - Customization
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CoreResultsWebPart displays search results
Columns property – XML specifying Managed Properties
XSL – Transform the HTML output of the search results
Column names are specified in lower case in XSL (i.e.: Color
will be color)
Querying Search
• Used to search by Managed Properties
• Can specify Scopes (Scope:”MyScope”)
• Can be passed via URL to CoreResultsWebPart (k Query
String parameter)
• AND implied between each keyword (i.e.: Color:”Red”
Size:”M” is the same Color=“Red” AND Size=“M”)
• OR implied when multiple keywords of the same managed
property used (i.e.: Color:”Red” Color:”Blue” translates to
Color=“Red” OR Color=“Blue”)
Drawbacks of Enterprise Search
• No out of the box Wildcard Search (i.e.: docum*) – Use
DotNetMafia WildcardSearchWebPart –
http://wildcardsearch.codeplex.com
• Search Center customizations limited to XSLT
• Advanced Search web part is ugly and not very configurable
• Cannot exclude sections of pages to not be indexed
• Most search web parts are sealed and cannot be inherited
from
What’s new in 2010?
• Lots of things!
• More Options – Search Server 2010, SharePoint Server
2010, FAST Search Server 2010
• Refinement Web Part
• Keyword Query Syntax Improvements – Wildcards!
• Multiple Index Servers
• Greatly improved People Search
• Common API between SharePoint Search and FAST
FAST Search Results
Visual, Conversational Search
Sorting on any
property
Visual Best Bets
Refinement with
counts
on any property
Scrolling PowerPoint
Previews
Thumbnails
Similarity
Search
Indexing Other Sources
• File Shares
• Database
Questions?
Corey Roth
Blog: www.dotnetmafia.com
Twitter: twitter.com/coreyroth