Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog

Introduction There are many repositories which are case sensitive. To elaborate with an example, in case sensitive repositories the links: http://myhost/CaseSensitivePage.htm and http://myhost/casesensitivepage.htm represent different...

Hello, my name is Hernando Silva and, as some of you might know from Dan's previous posts , for the last year I participated in the planning, deployment and management of the SharePoint 2010 Search service at a small scale. In this post I will...

Hello again and welcome to the SharePoint Server 2010 Search series of blog postings dedicated to detailing the lessons I have learned in the process of hosting our dogfood system. In this posting I will be talk about the high level concepts utilized...

One of my favorite features of SharePoint Server 2010 Search is the health reporting that we added. With the query health reports you can very easily see what is going on with end user query latencies as well as pinpoint were the time is getting spent...

Hello again, Dan Blood here. To layout the lessons I've learned in hosting Search 2010 I will provide you with a full picture of what the hardware behind SearchBeta looks like. Be aware that the hardware is a little underpowered for the count of items...

Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) and Server Name Mapping are two features SharePoint provides to alter the URLs returned in search results - a common practice used by many companies for their internal and external users. Both features are available in both...

Hello, Dan Blood here with another series of blog postings about running SharePoint Server 2010 Search. Some of you may be familiar with a similar set of postings that I wrote for MSS or SharePoint Search 2007. The following set of postings will be targeted...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

(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...

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...

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…...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

After years of writing customer proposals, internal memoranda, and various stuffily formal documents, it feels like a luxury to be able to just write what I think about enterprise search. It’s actually part of my job these days and I’m looking forward...

The Mirage, Las Vegas, Feb 9-11 Since its inaugural conference in 2006, FAST forward has been a venue for though leadership and innovation in the field of search. This year, FAST forward’09 is the industry’s largest business and technology conference...

We’ve got great news to share! Last month, Gartner published the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, and Microsoft was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant. Since the completion of the acquisition, we’ve worked incredibly hard to communicate...