A discussion of the FAST search engine which is now part of SharePoint Portal Server. We explore the business opportunities in both employee-facing and customer-facing scenarios and discuss the differences in the technology from the perspective of readers that are already familiar with SharePoint.
It is easy to create content. Fire up a Word document and post it, or create a sub-site on your Intranet and add pages. Even creating a new web site isn’t hard anymore – most business users can go through a process to launch one quickly. The benefit: quickly converting corporate knowledge into something that can be consumed by others. The challenge: it is up to the end user to ‘know’ where to find it, and that often doesn’t happen.
There is good news. Today’s search engines make it easy to hook up new sources of content. Check out the solution you have today for internal search and hunt around for a dropdown box of options. There are probably dozens. Each time a new web site comes online internally, the search engine needs to be pointed at it. It probably includes: HR content, news, product information, service information, people directory, manuals & procedures, links to tools, potentially file shares, email, collaboration environments like SharePoint, plus perhaps a Documentum or Interwoven, and likely multiplied by geography, business units, secured content, or all of the above.
The user is faced with two options: 1) choose a source, or 2) search everything. Lets look at each in more detail.
1) Choose a Source – this option requires an employee to know what a three or four word description means, and what kind of content is likely to be included. It also assumes that it is possible to name the content, and that generally a single type is available. As that is often not possible (consider how many different types of content you have on your ‘Intranet’), the sources get redefined to be more granular. The result: many more options to choose from. Realistically end users cannot be expected to hunt through this list to find the right one, which leads to most choosing the second option.
2) Search Everything – This is often the default: search across all content under index and provide a result set. That can include hundreds of thousands of items, and as you get all of your content under index it can easily span millions of entries. This option assumes two things. First, that your search engine can bring back the top 10 relevant results every time based on a few words of input, and second that each result should be displayed in the same format (typically, title, link, preview, plus potentially a date). Do those assumptions seem reasonable?
So, what to do? More on that soon.
I am interested in the solution you propose...
My previous post outlined the problem with the ‘traditional’ approach to search scoping. To explore