Hello Kind readers…
This gives you a quick overview of how search is provided and works in SharePoint 2010, this post does not take you in-depth of custom development but hopefully should enable you to answer a question like "So what is search in SharePoint 2010 all about"
1. Microsoft offers five different types of search experiences
a. SP2010 foundation search can only works for one site collection at a time and cannot index external data sources
b. Search sever express can index external data source and supports search federation
c. Search server 2010 can scale across multiple servers
d. SP server 2010 includes all features of above plus integration with people search, taxonomy and social networking
e. FAST search
2. The indexing process in SSA (search service application) contains properties as well as access control information for result trimming based on rights
3. Ranking Model in search
a. The results returned in search are displayed based on ranks defined in the ranking model as in what to show on top and what's important
b. There are in all 9 ranking models that ships with SP
c. Ranking model depends on,
i. Query-Independent features (static information in search)
ii. Query-dependent features (dynamic info like query against managed properties, in this case the managed property database is directly accessed)
d. Authoritative pages define how the item will be ranked based whats the click distance of the item from the authoritative page (this page is defined in central admin)
4. With MOSS 2007 it was not possible to override the search web parts but with SharePoint 2010 you can inherit the Search web parts to gain access to the Query pipe line
5. To gain access to The query pipe line search core results web part is to be inherited.
6. To get access to the QueryManager you need to override the GetXPathNavigator method, which in turns gives direct access to UserQuery property for manipulation
7. Using the Location object access to the federated locations can also be taken and you can do further customization using the Ranking Model
8. Working with Keyword syntax
a. + and - are used for required and excluding results respectively, example -- tanmay - "tanmay is a SharePoint boy" this will get all search results for tanmay except when used in the phrases as mentioned in quotes
b. KeywordQuery class can be used to create custom query web parts
c. Results are retuned in a table collection in the form of IDataReader objects
d. KeywordQuery QueryText property should be set to keyword syntax "query"
9. Working with SQL Full-text search
a. FullSqlTextQuery class can be used to build more complex and advanced queries it is similar to KeywordQuery class in terms of properties but accepts a proper format SQL for making query to the DB
- "T"