Summary

The enterprise search capabilities of MOSS are among the most powerful functions available in the product. Often simply installing MOSS and enabling search provides organizations with a vast improvement in their ability to retrieve information quickly.

Although the search capabilities are robust out of the box, it is possible to improve the search experience without needing to be a developer or administrator through some simple customization or even by understanding how SharePoint calculates relevancy. In summary:

• Like other search engines, SharePoint uses a search index to be able to quickly provide search results to the user. The concept of the index that MOSS uses is the same as the index for this book. If you wanted to find information about a particular topic in this book, the index points you to all the pages where that topic is mentioned. MOSS creates the index before you ever enter a search term so that when you run your search, the results can be quickly served up. The process of building the index is called crawling.

• SharePoint uses metadata to determine which content most closely relates to your search query. M etadata is data about data. For example, metadata about a document includes the title, the author of the document, the creation date, or the data type. Metadata may also include descriptive information about the content, such as subject matter, intended audience, or other details that might be useful to further categorize the data.

• Relevance describes how pertinent or applicable the search results returned by a search engine are to the user’s needs. In other words, did the user find the desired information? SharePoint uses an algorithm to determine the relevance of a piece of content. When a search query is entered, the term is compared to the values in the search index using a complex set of algorithms and is assigned a relevance ranking. The documents with the highest relevance are shown to the user as search results.

• SharePoint search is administered through the SSP administration site. Not all information workers may have access to this site, but there are many settings here that directly impact how search works. If you do not have access to the Search Administration site, it is at least valuable to understand what options are available so that you can work with your SharePoint administrator to refine the search settings if needed.

• There’s more to the search experience than just typing in a query into a search box. The search center template is made up of many different Web Parts that can be modified and customized to improve the search experience.