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Search Component

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The search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007 is significantly enhanced to provide a consistent and familiar search experience, increased relevance of search results, functions to search for people and expertise, ability to index and search data in line-of-business (LOB) applications, and improved manageability and extensibility.

Search component

The following table describes these features, and whether they are new or enhanced.

Feature Description

Consistent Search Experience (new)

Common implementation of Microsoft Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. (Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 offered users differing search environments.)

Query Extensibility and Programmability (enhanced)

Query object model to create custom search Web Parts.

To access Enterprise Search from client applications, use the Query Web service, which includes the QueryEx Web method. This method supports returning multiple results sets, such as high-confidence and special terms, in addition to the relevant results set.

Enterprise Search supports the following types of syntax for search queries:

Search Manageability (enhanced)

Administration object model for a comprehensive and coherent management experience.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports centralized management of distributed indexing and search services within a SharePoint server farm. Crawl and search very large collections of business data and document content without a significant increase in operations overhead.

Search additional types of enterprise content, as follows::

  • LOB application data and reports crawled and retrieved through the Business Data Catalog

  • People-based searching for colleagues and others who share a set of common interests

  • Third-party repositories (continued support) by using custom protocol handlers and filters

Relevance (enhanced)

Revamped ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and MSN Internet Search that is tuned for unique requirements of searching enterprise content. New content relevance algorithms include:

  • Click distance

  • Hyperlink anchor text

  • URL depth

  • URL text matching

  • Automated metadata extraction

  • Automatic language detection

  • File type relevancy biasing

  • Enhanced text analysis

Business Data Search (new)

Enterprise Search and the Business Data Catalog feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to crawl and search any relational database or other information store that is accessible by ADO.NET or a Web service, for example, data in a CRM system.

Highly customize and fully integrate search results from the Business Data Catalog with Business Data Catalog search scopes and other Search Center features.

People and Expertise Searching (enhanced)

Enhancements that provide:

  • Support for indexing and search of any LDAP directory

  • Dedicated Search Center tab to search for people

  • Returning SharePoint groups and Active Directory distribution lists in search results

  • People search results grouped by "social distance" from you and your common interests.

  • Search result refinement by properties such as department

Search Scopes (new)

Enterprise Search scopes decoupled from content sources can be based on arbitrary content properties such as URL, type, and author. Search scopes can be narrow or broad, and can be based on simple or multiple rules such as "All Marketing Plans on the North American Sales Web Site."

Globally define search scopes at the Shared Services Provider level or at the site collection level.

See Also

Concepts

Comparisons of SharePoint Search Versions
Enterprise Search Architecture
Querying Enterprise Search

Other Resources

Searching in Office SharePoint Server 2007
Programmatically Administering Enterprise Search