The search technology have gone a long way, unlike before when crawling seems like a very straightforward query, now it has evolved to a much more sophisticated architecture to cater to businesses’ increasing data.
SharePoint 2013 through Microsoft’s acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer ASA, have also injected some muscle to its search capabilities. Now at par, with key industry players in the search domain, SharePoint 2013 has introduced a lot of improvements to its search capabilities.
User Interface
Remember when you make a Google search, and from the list you hover your mouse and see a snippet of the content? SharePoint 2013 can now do that too. Just rest the pointer over the list of results, and a preview appears. It is also now easy to identify what type of content a search result is. For example, if it’s a document, you can see an application icon in front.
There is also another thing called the “result block”. It is a subset of search results that are grouped. For example, if you search presentation, PowerPoint documents can appear in a group. One more amazing thing about the result block is that you can actually configure them to be in accordance with business preferences; or even promote and rank them.
Displaying Contents based on Relevance
Don’t you just love how Amazon search results work? It stores your search behavior and recommends content based on those. In fact, sometimes it goes a little bit overboard when it starts emailing you items based on your past searches.
SharePoint 2013 now also has that technology. It improves search relevance through a combination of various factors through a new ranking model, content relevance, query rules and result sources. Just like Amazon, SharePoint 2013 remembers your search and which among those you click. Through recall, SharePoint marks this as relevant and uses this information to continuously improve relevance.
Search results can also be customized by query rules. Administrators can help improve search results by adding “query rules” or specific conditions and actions that would be relevant to the search.
Crawling Sophistication
Crawling in SharePoint 2013 can also be configured so that it works continuously and removes the need to schedule incremental craws to keep a fresh search index.
Searching Unstructured Content
Looking for keywords on the content title or body is also part of SharePoint 2013’s new search capability. Now it can be configured to look for words or phrases and even allows companies to maintain their own dictionaries.
The search schema
SharePoint 2013’s search schema tells how properties of crawled information are stored in the search index. These properties are then mapped to managed properties; and new attributes can be further added to them. For example, they can be sorted or refined, thereby lessens the effort needed to display bug search results. Refining them further enables the return of a more useful search results.
Reports
SharePoint 2013 also generates health reports and crawl health reports.
If you are looking to introduce a finer search result solution to your current SharePoint 2013 implementation, our team of experts at Portal Integrators can help. Contact us to know more.