Outlining Search Improvements in SharePoint 2010

Another area of significant improvement in SharePoint 2010 is SharePoint’s built-in Enterprise Search functionality. Rebuilt as a service application, SharePoint’s native search tool has been rearchitected to enable the following:

• Redundant index functionality, now providing for index redundancy and high availability, something not possible in SharePoint 2007.

• Content sources can now be divided among multiple index partitions, such as what is illustrated in Figure 1.3. This allows for a greater load to be distributed between multiple servers.

• Improved search relevancy.

In addition to improvements in SharePoint 2010’s native search, Microsoft also offers a different tool for SharePoint search: FAST Search Server 2010. FAST Search has all of the improvements available with the native SharePoint 2010 search but adds additional features, such as thumbnail previews, click-through relevance, and automatic metadata tagging. You can find more details on SharePoint 2010’s search in Chapter 8, “Leveraging and Optimizing Search in SharePoint 2010.”