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Introduction to Enterprise Search
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Understanding why search is more important and more complicated today
- A survey of SharePoint 2010 search product offerings and how to choose the right one for you
- A look at the search user experience, how to utilize it, and what information it provides to end users
Search has become a powerful and ubiquitous tool in business enterprises and personal life. Very few users in an enterprise have not had some experience with a search engine in one form or another. Search engines help us find such things as pictures of tree frogs, websites that sell office chairs, and the latest car-chase videos. They also help us answer questions like: Where do tree frogs live? How is the traffic on the Eisenhower? What is today’s horoscope?
In short, search connects people to data that is timely and relevant to their current needs. In today’s enterprises, the data is located on multiple systems that may or may not be under the control of the organization. Relevant data on those systems is in an increasingly abundant number of data formats. The corpus of content that our organizations are interested in is so large that end users can no longer simply browse for files or remember where all their documents are. In today’s enterprise, search is becoming a business-critical system.
The SharePoint 2010 stack of search products offers search solutions that address nearly every search need that an organization may have, from the small-scale team ...