What's New: SharePoint Enterprise Search in SharePoint Server 2010

  • Article

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

In this article
Keyword Syntax
Search Web Parts
Refinement Panel
Connector Framework
Relevance Enhancements
Federated Search
Visual Upgrade

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 includes all of the enterprise search features and functionality that were part of Enterprise Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and provides many new capabilities. This topic summarizes the new features and enhancements for SharePoint Enterprise Search.

Keyword Syntax

The updated keyword query syntax supports the following new features:

  • Boolean, proximity, synonym, and wildcard operators

  • Prefix matching for free-text and property restriction queries

  • Property operators with non-text fields

For more information, see Keyword Query Syntax Reference.

Search Web Parts

The search Web Parts are shared for SharePoint Server search and FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, and so provide a unified search experience. They are built on the federated search object model, and the classes for Web Parts—such as Search Box, Refinement Panel, and Search Core Results—are now public, so that you can extend them. For documentation on the search Web Parts' classes, methods, and properties, see the Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls namespace.

Refinement Panel

The search results page includes a refinement panel, which provides a summary of search results and enables users to quickly browse and understand the results. You can configure custom refinement categories based on managed properties and enterprise content management (ECM) taxonomy nodes. For more information, see Refinement Panel Overview.

Connector Framework

SharePoint Server search uses Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to crawl and index external data. The connector framework model provided by SharePoint Server search enables you to create search connectors to connect and crawl custom content repositories. With the connector framework you can create custom indexing connectors by using the Microsoft .NET Framework to connect to external content so that it can be crawled by SharePoint Server search and included in the content index. For more information, see SharePoint Server Search Connector Framework.

Relevance Enhancements

SharePoint Server search has improved algorithms for better matching and ranking capabilities, and improved language support. Support is also provided for creating customized ranking models to improve search results relevance for significantly different collections, new content sources, and search verticals. To learn about how to customize ranking models, see the Ranking Model Schema documentation.

With FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, you get advanced options for relevance tuning, sorting, and ranking. For more information, see Improving Relevance for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.

Using federated search, you can surface search results from repositories that are not crawled by the Search service application in the search experience. Built-in Related Searches and People Results are federated into the search experience. For more information, see Federated Search Overview.

Visual Upgrade

When you upgrade from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010, the Visual Upgrade feature enables you to leave a site in the user interface (UI) of the previous version, or to move it to the UI of the new version. This enables you to preserve the customizations on a Search Center upon upgrade, and then choose whether to render the site in the old or new UI, giving you the ability to update customizations to work in the new UI.