Why does SharePoint need
FAST?
The answer, according to
Russ Houberg is the relevancy, and what happens to the quality of your search's results as you scale up the size of your index. At the moment, 50 million documents is SharePoint's ceiling, and it needs to be higher because the amount of content we are generating is growing all the time. Back in the 90's Altavista was a good search engine, but as the Internet grew, the relevancy of the results it came back went down. With Search Server 2008, SharePoint will have federated search, so soon the amount of content SharePoint can handle will be much more than 50 million, but to keep the quality of the results good, something like FAST is needed.
As a recent
press release said "Together, FAST and Microsoft are dedicated to delivering truly relevant, scalable and security-enhanced enterprise search solutions that drive business value for customers." Note the first two there: relevancy and scale. They go hand in hand.
Labels: Search
Interesting moves from MS in the area of Search. Before with SharePoint you had 2 options: MOSS Search and WSS Search. MOSS search was not free and included cool stuff like People search and searching in other databases via the Business Data Catalog. WSS search was free, but could only search one WSS site. Now there are two more options. Search Server Express and Search Server. Search Server Express is now release candidate, so you can have a look, it is a free way to search across all your WSS sites. The downside is no People search and BDC, and it is only for Single Server farms. Search Server will connect to MOSS, some time early in 2008, and will allow for
federated search, in other words, you can search other indexes from MOSS.
Here's a comparison of the features:
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/default.aspx#compareThe bottom line is the more you pay the more you get, but Search Server Express is a great deal because it has great features and it is free.
Here's the announcement on the Enterprise Search Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/enterprisesearch/archive/2007/11/06/announcing-microsoft-search-server-2008-express.aspxAnd some details form the MS site:
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/features.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb931107.aspxDownload Search Server Express 2008 (Release Candidate) here:
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/downloads/default.aspxLabels: Search
