Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010

The SharePoint 2010 lineup includes improvements to its enterprise search capabilities, particularly in the areas of relevance, user refinement of search queries, people search, and scalability. For customers without an enterprise search solution, the improvements could bolster the case for deploying SharePoint Server 2010, and smaller businesses could benefit from using the low-cost Search Server or free Search Server Express. Organizations that need more robust enterprise search capabilities and scale should consider the new (and more expensive) FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.

Enterprise Search and SharePoint

Enterprise search tools help workers locate internal information in a wide range of formats stored in intranets, messaging systems, shared files on networks, and databases. Enterprise search products use components called crawlers, which automatically examine information sources on networks to retrieve data stored within files and databases and then create indexes that contain pointers to information discovered. Users conduct search queries by entering keywords into a Web-based interface. These queries are run against the index, and the system returns results ranked in order of relevance. The user experience and underlying technical components are similar to those of Web-based search engines such as Google or Bing, but at smaller scale, and with support for indexing more types of data.