Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog

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

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:48:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Innovation on Linux and UNIX

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:19:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Regular Expressions Support in SharePoint 2010 Crawling

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:52:00 GMT

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...(read more)

The Search Developer Story in SharePoint 2010 - Query Interfaces

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:39:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:56:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:22:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:53:00 GMT

(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...(read more)

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

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:30:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Coping with Hype in Enterprise Search Marketing

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:26:00 GMT

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…...(read more)

A Focus on Search User Experience

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:17:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Observations from the Text Analytics Summit 2009

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:56:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Thinking Big – Search Scale and Performance on a Budget

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Fri, 22 May 2009 20:02:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Actionable Search – From What to Why?

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:45:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Search and Natural User Interfaces - Part 2

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:47:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Search and Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) - Part 1

Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:08:00 GMT

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...(read more)