Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog

Business Data Search in SharePoint 2010: Crawling associated external content types

2010-03-09T18:48:00Z

Business data associations are widely used to fetch related external content (ex. data from two sql tables connected by a foreign key or an email that contains attachments) and display it in SharePoint webparts. SharePoint Search 2010 ships with new features that enable crawling of Business Data Connectivity associations. This post describes how to use the search specific metadata properties for crawling associations and the different user experiences that can be enabled. For a primer on how to define...(read more)

Innovation on Linux and UNIX

2010-02-04T22:19:00Z

Innovation is at the heart of our enterprise search strategy, and a commitment to innovation is what brought FAST and Microsoft together. When we announced the acquisition two years ago, we said that we were committed to cross-platform innovation—that we’d “continue to offer stand-alone versions of ESP that run on Linux and UNIX,” and that we would provide updates to these versions to address customer concerns and add new features. Over the last two years, we’ve done just that. We’ve continued to...(read more)

Regular Expressions Support in SharePoint 2010 Crawling

2010-01-21T20:52:00Z

Search admins often need to omit from a crawl files that match a certain pattern. E.g.: · In a bank, file names starting with SSN · In a business site, files names with credit card number · URLs having specific value of a certain parameter of an aspx file · etc.. The usual solution is to allow admins to create “crawl rules” that restrict crawlers from following specific links. The most basic crawl rule specifies a complete URL for the file to be crawled, which requires the admin to create as many...(read more)

The Search Developer Story in SharePoint 2010 - Query Interfaces

2009-11-20T23:39:00Z

SharePoint 2010 includes a number of features that make the platform easier to use for developers. An improved Visual Studio integration, the addition of LINQ to the SharePoint platform, sandboxing for deployment, and the new developer dashboard are just a few examples of how developing and deploying SharePoint solutions have become much easier. As a member of the enterprise search development team that has worked to bring FAST Search into SharePoint 2010, I can tell you that a lot has also been...(read more)

Enterprise Search and Bing Services – Part 2: Bing Geo-coding Structured/Unstructured Text for Search

2009-11-10T02:56:00Z

Web-based mapping services from Microsoft and others have been around for a number of years, but all are naturally dependent on data that contains well defined geo-coordinate information – usually latitude and longitude pairs. But what if you have content without clearly defined geo-tagged? For example, news stories may contain references to places around the world, but they don’t always come pre-tagged with geo-coordinate information for these places. Is it possible to infer this information and...(read more)

FAST meets SharePoint - What's Coming in Search for SharePoint 2010

2009-10-28T01:22:00Z

Last week was the 2009 SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. The sold-out attendance of 7400 doubled the number from the previous SharePoint conference 1 ½ years ago. This is not too surprising given the incredible momentum of SharePoint and the fact that much of the event was dedicated to disclosure of the highly anticipated SharePoint 2010 release. Surprising or not, it was gratifying for us search guys to see the level of interest in the new search capabilities being disclosed for 2010. Several...(read more)

Enterprise Search and Bing Services – Part 1: The Bing Translator

2009-09-22T19:53:00Z

(In May of this year, Microsoft launched its Bing search service for the Web. While Bing has shown steady growth in the Web search market, it’s not well known that Bing also includes a collection of services that can be accessed programmatically to enhance enterprise applications. This is the first of series of guest posts that explore how to combine some of these Bing services with Microsoft enterprise search offerings. nt) If your organization has customers or employees in multiple regions around...(read more)

Searching for Virtue - Virtuous Cycles as a Model for Successful Search Implementations

2009-09-14T18:30:00Z

I like design patterns. I like the idea that there are right ways to do things and wrong ways (anti-patterns). Of course I understand that the world is not so black and white, but collecting and cataloging the collected wisdom of what works and what doesn’t when designing software systems seems like a very good idea to me. I’ve written about this before. A couple of months ago, I blogged about the increased interest in HCIR and best practice patterns for search user experience (UX) . In that post...(read more)

Coping with Hype in Enterprise Search Marketing

2009-08-28T00:26:00Z

Not long ago, I was invited to participate at a customer’s annual conference. It was an amazing experience. I’ve been to conferences of all sorts, but I confess I’ve never attended an event quite like this one. Let’s just say that I’m used to.. well… less energetic IT conferences. This particular company is *extremely* good at marketing and really understands the power of hype. The combination of pounding dance music, an elaborate stage set up, spectacular lighting, and, most importantly , well crafted...(read more)

A Focus on Search User Experience

2009-07-14T18:17:00Z

It’s happening… slowly … but it’s happening. Attention in search is finally shifting from a focus on low-level features and relevancy models to looking at the whole user experience for information access. I, for one, am very glad to see this trend. Of all the enterprise technologies out there, few are planted so squarely at the interface of humans and machine as search. And yet, for many users, the search input box and a list of blue links is still the pinnacle of a search user experience – a user...(read more)

Observations from the Text Analytics Summit 2009

2009-06-10T01:56:00Z

One of the hard parts about organizing a conference like the 5 th annual Text Analytics Summit , held last week in Boston, must be selecting the industry case studies. Text analytics is a highly specialized, but broad reaching topic that has applications in life sciences, financial service, legal, retail, government, media, and entertainment, to name a few. Any one of these industries could have filled the conference with interesting examples. As it was, most of the case studies and vendor briefings...(read more)

Thinking Big – Search Scale and Performance on a Budget

2009-05-22T20:02:00Z

I recently came across Paul Nelson’s informative post on search scalability . I don’t know how long it’s been up there, but reading it made me think of customers I’ve spoken with recently who are looking to scale up their search deployments, but, due to tight budgets, want to do so without simply buying more hardware. Paul focuses on document count as the main consideration for architecting scalable search, saying: There is really only one dimension of size: The total count of documents in the system...(read more)

Actionable Search – From What to Why?

2009-05-12T21:45:00Z

Day 1 at the Enterprise Search Summit in NYC is wrapping up and I’ve just listened to Lisa Denissen from Shearman & Sterling talk about Actionable Search. Actionable search is a key tenet of Microsoft’s enterprise search strategy, so it was good to see promotion of the concept. For many organizations, just adding basic, no-frills search to an intranet can have a big impact on employee productivity, but to really create an optimal search experience it helps to understand the processes that drive...(read more)

Search and Natural User Interfaces - Part 2

2009-05-03T16:47:00Z

In my first post on this subject last week, I referred to a scene in the movie “Minority Report” as a visionary example of a natural user interfaces (NUIs) and, more to the theme of this blog, a visionary example of ad hoc search within a NUI. I realize that I didn’t offer a definition of NUIs in that post, so, before I go back to the search connection, here’s a quick primer. NUIs Defined Natural user interfaces or NUIs rely on natural expressions like touches and gestures to directly and intuitively...(read more)

Search and Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) - Part 1

2009-04-27T16:08:00Z

About five years ago or so, I participated in a conference panel where the question was asked: “What will search interfaces look like 20 years from now?”. I had just seen Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi film “Minority Report” starring Tom Cruise, so I referred to the scene where Cruise’s character is interacting with a futuristic looking visual display and using appropriately dramatic gestures to grab, spin, shrink, expand, and otherwise manipulate the various news stories and images floating on the display...(read more)