SharePoint Search 101: What can I find on the search dashboard?

The SharePoint 2010 comes with a wide range of administration, operations and reporting features that aid in deployment, scaling and monitoring the performance of the search application.

The administration interface allows you to quickly see the topology of the search application with all components involved, such as query components, index partitions, administration, crawling and property databases. You can It provides you with a at a glance system status with information on the number of items in the index, crawl and propagation status, query and crawling rate and crawl history with success and failure of the crawl statuses.

Quick menu items provide access to Content Sources, Crawl Rules, File Types and Crawler Impact Rules where you can set the frequency with which each crawler component will be requesting items from specific site. The Queries and Results section of the quick lunch menu provides access points to specify Authoritative Pages, Federated Locations and search scopes as well as Metadata Properties configuration.

The Reports section allows to quickly access a wide variety of Administration and Web Analytics Reports. Administration Reports help to understand the query latency and crawl rate and show the overall performance of the application thus helping administrators to anticipate the necessity of adding new search components or modifications to existing topology based on the performance needs.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint Search 2010,Search Administration

SharePoint Search 101: Why do I need to extract content?

A while ago, I’ve started writing search vignettes for the MSFT Enterprise Search Product team, but the project got stalled and I’ve decided (with MSFT permission) to start the “SharePoint Search 101” series of mini articles on my blog. All content is related either to SharePoint Search 2010 and/or Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP). These mini articles are intended to be small, easily digestible snippets of content that answer the What, How and Why of a given enterprise search feature of SharePoint Server 2010 and/or FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. The HOW portion is usually covered by the short demo or list of steps.

Why do I need to extract content?

(Entity Extraction, Managed Properties, Refiners)

Entity extraction is a way of pulling out meaningful information that might not be otherwise explicitly defined by end users as metadata. Managed Properties that are created through entity extraction and surfaced in the search interface as refiners are defining alternative structure or visual presentation of structure that can be used to narrow down the search results set.

When you present refiners based on managed properties created from entities extracted from content or metadata, users can easily filter out the result set based on the values of those extracted entities. Refiners can be shallow or deep, where shallow refiners are based on top 50 results brought back by query, and deep refiners is when all results are brought back with exact count of the number of results.

While managed properties are available in SharePoint Search 2010 OOTB, you can only map crawled properties that are exposed in lists and libraries metadata.

In the FAST Search for SharePoint there are built in entity extractors such as People, Companies and Locations. You can define your own list of terms to be extract from the content by building a dictionary or you can create a content processing stage that will extract entities based on a specific business rule or a need as well as extract entities through matching them to regular expressions. For example you can extract client names from document where this information is not available as metadata and expose it as managed property.

Note: Deep refiners are available only in FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

Enjoy :-)

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint Search 2010,managed properties,crawled properties,entity extraction

ESUG June Meeting - An In-depth Look into FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS)

JUNE MEETING REMINDER - Wednesday, June 9th, 5:30 PM REGISTER NOW SUBJECT An In-depth Look into FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS) SPEAKER Didier Oliver - is a Technical Sales Specialist in the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group.  His focus includes pre-sales briefings, evaluation support, requirement analysis, architectural design and working with implementation services teams.  Didier has been involved in the Search market for over 15 years.  Prior to Microsoft Didier has worked at other firms specializing in Search technologies such as Verity and Autonomy.  The session will focus on the new FAST Search for Internet Sites (FSIS). FSIS provides a new platform for building powerful and compelling online experiences.  We drill into the exciting new capabilities including: Interaction Management Services (IMS) Content Transformation Services (CTS) The Search Designer for Visual Studio The Business Manager Console MEETING AGENDA 5:30 PM - Networking (Food and Drinks) 6:00 PM - News and Highlights 6:10 PM - A word from our sponsor 6:30 PM - Speaker Presentation 7:25 PM - Wrap-Up and Give-Aways 7:30 PM - After Meeting Social ADDRESS 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Sixth Floor NY, NY 10104 To attend this meeting, REGISTER TODAY!

About the User Group The Enterprise Search User Group is a SharePoint based community with a focus on Enterprise Search aimed to provide valuable and timely information to its members. Its primary goal is to provide a forum that encourages disparate practices and business groups to come together and share thoughts, ideas, successes and failures, to cultivate a borderless body of knowledge.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Search User Group,FAST search for internet sites,FSIS