New Out-of-the-Box Search Features in Sharepoint 2010

Search has long been one of SharePoint’s strong points. It’s easy to use – simply type in a few keywords –very fast and seems to retrieve everything short of the kitchen sink. And therein also lay its weakness. Results came back as a long (often very long) list, mixing documents and folders together. If there was some form of relevance ranking going on, it wasn’t easy to spot it. And unless you built your own search interface, the out-of-the-box search function didn’t allow for any use of the SharePoint metadata users had so carefully added, let alone scoping by document metadata.

SharePoint 2010 changes all that with a slew of new search functionality and much improved results display. For example, it will now be possible to use metadata to filter document sets and to navigate through document libraries. SharePoint 2010 filtering and navigation by both user applied metadata and SharePoint content management metadata such as

SharePoint metadata (note: this is not document metadata but additional terms added by users on upload or by default through the assignment of a document to a particular folder/library) can be used to filter documents when searching or to navigate through a document library.

In addition to user-added metadata filtering, it will also be possible to filter by a small subset of document metadata such as date created, date last modified and author. Key Filtering is further supported by autocomplete functionality so users will not have to remember all the possible options (or how to spell them!)

The display of search results is much improved. No more cryptic laundry lists! Each result is now presented with longer snippets from the documents concerned i.e. it looks much more like Bing. Compare the screenshots below. The first is from SharePoint 2007 and the second from SharePoint 2010. The relevance ranking algorithms have also been enhanced which should mean that the most useful results display first.

Search Results in SharePoint2007

Search Results in SharePoint2010

Critical to winnowing down a large document set, SharePoint will now automatically display “Refinements” on the left hand side of search results which, as the name suggests, can be used to narrow down further the results. (Note: these refinements are derived from SharePoint and basic document metadata (dates, authors etc) so the more effort users and businesses put into tagging documents, the more useful this feature will be).

At the bottom of the results page, there will also be “Did You Mean” suggestions to help users with possible misspelling, acronyms etc.

And last but definitely not least, Microsoft has embraced the mobile world and made it easy to use SharePoint search features on any smart phone.