Many people aren’t comfortable with the notion of a search-driven application until they see one. The example shown here is a mockup of an application (Figure A). It's not out of the box, but it's built through a combination of out-of-the-box parts (like the Federated Results Web Part), configuration settings that don’t require code (like custom rank profiles), and extensions built with SharePoint Designer and/or Visual Studio.
This example is similar to the out-of-the-box Search Center (refiners on the left, core results in the center, federated results on the right). It extends the out-of-the-box Refiner Web Part and combines it with the SharePoint Chart Web Part to create visual refiners. It uses a feature called result collapsing to organize results by customer, then drills into that customer with a single click. It brings in line-of-business data using Business Connectivity Services (BCS), and applies custom property extraction to it using the content processing pipeline.
Acting on search results, a user can create an email from selected results, schedule meetings, visit a team site, or even use the capabilities directly within SharePoint, such as social search, using SharePoint workflows.
Read the main article: Introducing FAST Search for SharePoint: A New Choice in Search.