Enterprise Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Article
10/16/2013

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 adds several new features and enhancements to Enterprise Search. The new features provide a consistent and familiar search experience, increased relevance of search results, new functions to search for people and expertise, ability to index and search data in line-of-business (LOB) applications, and improved manageability and extensibility.

The following sections briefly describe the major features and enhancements.

Consistent Search Experience

Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 now use a common implementation of Microsoft Search. This means that the search experience is consistent across both Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Improved Relevance

Enterprise Search includes a revamped ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research. It is specifically tuned for the unique requirements of searching enterprise content.

Specific new content relevance algorithms include the following:

Click distance
Hyperlink anchor text
URL depth
URL text matching
Automated metadata extraction
Automatic language detection
File type relevancy biasing
Enhanced text analysis

For more information about the relevance improvements in Enterprise Search, see Search Relevance Architecture Overview.

Search Manageability

Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports the centralized management of distributed indexing and search services within a SharePoint server farm. This makes it possible to index and search very large collections of business data and document content without significantly increasing operations overhead.

Included is a new managed Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration object model that you can use to create custom applications for administering Enterprise Search. For information about using this object model, see Getting Started with the Search Administration Object Model.

Fast Query Scoping Subsystem

Search scopes help users broaden or narrow the scope of their content searches. Enterprise Search scopes are now decoupled from content sources and can be based on arbitrary content properties such as URL, type, and author. Scopes can be based in simple rules, such as "All Marketing Plans," or multiple rules, such as "All Marketing Plans on the North American Sales Web Site, authored by John Smith."

In addition, search scopes can be defined globally at the Shared Services Provider (SSP) level and shared across sites, or at the site collection level.

Business Data Catalog Protocol Handler

Enterprise Search combined with the Business Data Catalog make it easy to index and search any relational database or other information store accessible by Microsoft ADO.NET or a Web service, for example, data in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

You do not need to write custom protocol handlers or IFilters or create searchable HTML representations of information in a database.

Search results from the Business Data Catalog can be highly customized and fully integrated with Enterprise Search scopes and other Search Center features.

Custom Search Query Applications

Enterprise Search provides a new Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Query object model that you can use to create custom search Web Parts. For information about using the new object model, see Query Object Model Overview; for information about building search Web Parts, see Getting Started with Custom Search Web Parts.

For accessing search results from client applications, Enterprise Search provides the backward-compatible Query Web service.

Enterprise Search includes a new Keyword syntax that supports passing the search terms directly to the Query engine. Backward-compatible support is also provided with the SQL and URL query syntaxes, so most Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 search queries will continue to work. For information about query syntax changes, see SQL Syntax Changes from SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

Custom Security Trimming

The Enterprise Search Query object model includes a new API, the ISecurityTrimmer interface, which developers can use to create custom security trimmers to trim search results at query time. This provides support for search results-trimming based on custom authentication types, as well as making it possible to perform up-to-date security trimming without requiring a re-crawl of content.