Understanding the SharePoint 2010 Search Components

Before you start configuring search in SharePoint 2010 it is important to understand the various components involved, as described in the following list:

• Content—The first thing that you need when you want to perform a search. Some might not consider content a component of search, but it is definitely at the heart of any search application. Content can be of various types such as within the site, from external data sources, and on file shares.

• Crawler—Also called the indexing component. This component crawls the content and indexes it for querying purposes.

• Crawl Database—Stores the indexed data.

• Query Component—Responsible for performing search against an index.

Figure 18.1 shows a graphical representation of these components.

Figure 18.1. SharePoint 2010 search components