Real World SharePoint® 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs

Chapter 17. Understanding Sharepoint 2010 Search

By Ágnes Molnár

Nowadays, we store more and more content in our computer systems. The stored bits themselves are data pieces, but they store information and very important knowledge for us, and for our companies:

• Data is a set of properties that represent objects, items, events, elements, and so on.

• Information is data that can be used.

• Knowledge is information put to action, mostly integrated with other information. It provides a basis for decisions and planning actions.

As you can see, it's not enough to store the data. You must process it, and make it usable and useful for the end users. The goal is to store as much information as possible, and build a strong and powerful Knowledge Base around the data.

But efficient storing is not enough; information that cannot be found is worthless. Either the users know where to find what they are looking for, or not. SharePoint 2010 provides a lot of capabilities to help end users find required information.

SharePoint 2010 has a much-improved search engine and infrastructure built on a much-improved information architecture. Extreme scalability, document sets, metadata management, and so on, all help end users to achieve a much more robust and powerful experience.

This chapter takes a detailed look at the improvements made to search capabilities in SharePoint 2010. In this chapter, you learn about the following:

• Improvements in SharePoint 2010

• Search architecture

• Administering SharePoint 2010 Search ...