Time flies doesn’t it? It’s time for a new Fivelist and since I have had a couple of discussions recently regarding different search solutions I thought it’s time to once again talk about SharePoint Search.

Search in WSS
I’m not sure that the standard search in WSS is actually allowed to be called search… It’s not very customizable but the good thing here is that Microsoft gives you the Search Server Express for free. This at least gives you quite a lot of extra things to do. For instance Federated search, iFilters, index file shares etc.

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/default.aspx

MOSS Search
For those of you that installed Moss in its first version know that since the Infrastructure update released almost a year ago it has taken a few steps forward when it know contain all the functionality that is included in Microsoft Search Server. There is however a huge disadvantage (as in the WSS with or without Search Server Express), there is no wild card search. Something that everyone needs to be able to find, well, anything…
But on the other hand, if you can solve that (as I will talk about below) you have quite a lot of options to tweak the search and since the SharePoint Search Results pages are built on publishing sites you have a lot of options to give the users a good search experience.

If your organization use My Sites then you have huge amount of advantages in sharing knowledge finding internal resources etc.

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/moss/default.aspx

 

Dot net mafia wild card search
The Dot net mafia wild card search is a Codeplex project that has been around for a while and now starts to be quite competitive, especially if you have the luck of internal development resources. What this wild card search does is that it actually replaces the standard (well you have to do it yourself) results web part and then displays a wild card search results. It works both for document’s items and for people search.

http://www.codeplex.com/WildcardSearch

Ontolica
Ontolica has a couple of different solutions for SharePoint and they come with different licenses. The basic search they offer is a wild card search that allows you to use “*” in any search webpart you have, it works very well but it’s probably their Ontolica Saerch solution for Moss that is most impressive. This offers a whole new search site template and includes Metadata search, Drill down results and images search. Just such a small thing as to search for people by letters makes it so much easier to work in Moss. (And no, I did not get anything for this…)

http://www.ontolica.com/

Fast
No one has probably missed that Microsoft know owns the Norwegian company Fast that delivers cutting edge search platforms and has been since quite a while be innovators within the field. Already today there are integration possibilities between Moss and Fast and this combination is one discussion for itself. I have not worked with this integration myself, just seen it so if anyone of you has and want to share your knowledge I will be more than happy to listen.
Moving forward with “Office 14″ we will see not one but a couple of steps forward for SharePoint and Search.

http://www.fast.no

 

Looking forward and looking at the more complex search engines that are still very expensive and mostly targeted for enterprise usage we have only seen the top of the iceberg. After having seen a couple of the cutting edge platforms in action I can’t stop thinking of Metadata and how much we actually will need it. We don’t need metadata? You will say I’m crazy, but the new search engines are so cleaver in indexing the content of the actual files that it will not surprise me if the huge focus on tagging everything with metadata values might decrease. I mean, think about it.
If you have a document with security classification “Internal” attached to it with a Site Column, and then in the actual file it says Security Classification “Secret”, what is most likely the accurate classification? And since the larger Search Engines or platforms can handle this, with language support and then sort it or classify it, don’t you agree just slightly with me?
I however still think that Site Columns and categorization in for instance SharePoint will remain a very important cornerstone of document management. But the usage will probably be more focused on sorting and grouping your documents or list items to present the data in different ways. Not as much as support for the search engine.

Microsoft has a Enterprise Search site where you can compare their own solutions and find more information: http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/default.aspx