Search for Sharepoint 2010
Search has got a whole lot bigger, you don’t need to look at google or MSFT to see that. Search has exploded in the past 10 years and one of the fantastic bi-products of the explosion is search for sharepoint 2010. Learning from all its mistakes in 2003, 2007 and online Sharepoint Search now trumps all other intranet search engines we have seen. Federated search zones, scanning and crawling almost everywhere, separated search centres, damn microsoft has search down in sharepoint 2010.
Our biggest win with search in microsoft sharepoint 2010 is the search centers, you can deploy them just like any other sharepoint website, under any other site (blank or publishing site) and you can give them scope’s, customise them specifically and tailor them uniquely. This is a big win in multi-stakeholder environments because you can have a search specific to each stakeholder, with a different look, feel and access rights. Fantastic.
The MOSS search service is also slick, it’ll chomp up resources in the course of crawling but its very slick. Incremental searches after the initial crawl will do in most cases and with its split database its easy to see how quick your organisations digital estate grows if you set a search service crawling everything. And it will search EVERYTHING – you can set it to search shared network drives for files, external websites, internal websites, other sharepoint site installs just for starters.
There is so much more to the sharepoint search in 2010 that we will probably do a complete setup guide for search in MOSS 2010 at some point – but just believe it is fantastic once you get it all setup. Accessing it via Csharp is also easy and effective. Congrats Microsoft, congrats.