SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Enterprise Search

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the new Microsoft enterprise search solution for organizations. It increases productivity and reduces information overload by providing users with the ability to find relevant content in many different locations and formats. The key is actionable search results that respect security permissions.

Features

The "Enterprise Search" functional area can be summed up with the following feature list:

• Relevance

• Business data search

• Metadata

• Customizable user experience

• Extensibility

Figure 1-20. People-finding search capabilities

Relevance

Relevance is very important when searching for data. If you have ever searched on Google, you have probably realized that the relevance of your search is the key to getting usable results. The new and improved search algorithms within MOSS 2007 are tuned for enterprise content. The use of relevance and ranking factors—such as click distance, hyperlink anchor text, URL depth, and metadata extraction—provide effective algorithms for yielding the best results for enterprise content. Microsoft has invested a great deal in fine-tuning this solution.

Another aspect of relevance is the search results are rendered more clearly. Search results are security trimmed, which keeps users from seeing content to which they do not have access. The results also include user-friendly features such as hit highlighting, duplicate ...