FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint is a new product from Microsoft that brings together the high-end search technology developed by FAST—a company Microsoft acquired in 2008—and SharePoint technology. The result, also known as “FAST Search for SharePoint” or “FS4SP,” offers a lot to SharePoint developers and IT pros. Let’s take a look at what this product is and how you can get the most out of it.
Going Beyond the Search Box
Most people understand intuitively that search is important, especially as the volume and diversity of information grows. But few people understand how search works or what makes one type of search different or better than another. Search technology is simple on the outside, but complex on the inside. To understand why you might care about FAST Search for SharePoint, it’s useful to understand what Enterprise Search is, how it differs from web search, and how one search experience can be better than another.
Enterprise Search makes an organization’s content accessible to employees, customers, and partners. Most people use web search (like Bing or Google) regularly at home, and expect search inside the firewall to be the same. However, Enterprise Search is different. Rather than just serving up public information in web pages and a handful of other formats, Enterprise Search must connect to dozens of different systems, parse hundreds of different types of files, and provide airtight security and access control. Instead of getting tens of thousands of pages relevant to almost any search on the web, corporate searchers prefer fewer but highly relevant results, and often there is only one "right" document. The structure and metadata of corporate data is important, as are company-specific vocabularies and taxonomies. The algorithms used for Enterprise Search are somewhat different, because they can’t depend as heavily on popularity and inter-web-page link structure.
The "box, button, and result list" paradigm used for the past 25 years in web search is limiting. With high-end search it's possible to deliver more effective and compelling search experiences. FAST Search for SharePoint delivers a better search experience out of the box. The box, button, and search results are still there, but the overall experience is quite different. The search experience provides better results faster by being visual, conversational, social, and contextual (Figure 1).
Humans are great at visual pattern recognition, so visual cues in the search experience help people quickly find information, identify patterns, and discover new insights. Visual capabilities in FAST Search for SharePoint include Visual Best Bets, document thumbnails and scrolling previews, people photos, and other capabilities that help users quickly explore and recognize information. Visual features on the main search page also tie to the "open in browser" capabilities of Office 2010, so a user can quickly edit and work with contents directly from the search results.
Conversational capabilities change how users interact with information for better results. Rather than typing a query, reading results, and then typing another query, the searcher can click to explore information. The conversational capabilities in FAST Search for SharePoint include deep refiners, query suggestions, sorting, similarity search, and multiple relevance ranking. Refiners let users drill down for more detailed information, and explore different facets of the result set. Deep refiners include counts across the entire result set, so that searchers can see the distribution of information within each facet. By exploring the demographics of information this way, you can gain insight even before you find a specific document.