It is well known that the amount of data in the world doubles very rapidly. Estimates of the rate vary: once every three months, once a year, every two years, or every three years. There is even a law predicting the growth, which is known as "Reed's Law". One reason for the differing estimates is that they predict growth for different types of data (business data, social networks, etc.). Whichever rate of growth we choose, it is clear that the amount of data in the world is increasing at a phenomenal rate. According to a study, by the University of California, Berkley, there were five exabytes of new data created worldwide in 2002 alone. That is about 5,000,000,000 GB of information.
As the amount of data increases, the problem is not so much that we do not have the information in our organization, it is more that it is difficult to find answers amongst all the other information that we have.
A key requirement of any collaboration system is that it allows users to easily search for the information they need so it is at their fingertips.
"Information overload" and "knowledge transfer" have been the focus of numerous keynote speeches by Microsoft's top executives, over the past couple of years. So, it comes as no surprise that SharePoint is no slouch when it comes to providing powerful search tools. The improvements to the search capabilities in MOSS 2007 over its predecessor are numerous and include useful new functionality, such as "Did you mean..." and the ability to search for people who have certain knowledge or skills.
In this final chapter, we will examine the search tools we have at our disposal and use them to add search capabilities to our site.
The power of SharePoint Enterprise Search is that it does not only query data stored in one location but can pull data from a variety of sources, a technique known as "federated searching".
When a user performs a search, different search engines are queried using the "Open Search" standard. This allows various data sources including SharePoint sites, desktops, line-of-business applications (e.g. Lotus Notes), and even users' brains to be searched and the results displayed in one aggregated results list.
Note
Don't worry about SharePoint searching our minds. This is not as scary as it sounds and requires no brain implants. SharePoint's people search merely identifies which brain the information is stored in and allows the data to be retrieved in a traditional manner, such as a telephone conversation or email exchange.