Microsoft Search Server 2008

Microsoft Search Server 2008 offers a familiar search experience, empowering your people to connect with your organization’s existing information and business systems. Search Server 2008 helps you build an enterprise-class search infrastructure that provides the right balance of control and simplicity.

• Find and act on your information

• Grow and extend your search solution

• Help secure and manage your search deployment

Find and act on your information

• Search Center. Empower your people to quickly find the information they need through a familiar, Web-style search interface and easy-to-use query syntax. Reconfigure the layout of Search Center elements without writing any code.
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  Content Summaries. Quickly browse textual summaries of content that appears in the context of your search terms.

  Hit Highlighting. Quickly spot where your search terms appear in search results and content summaries.

  Best Bets and Definitions. View highlighted editorialized sites or definitions for common search terms likely to have a single authoritative answer.

  Query Correction. Receive helpful "Did you mean?" suggestions for misspelled queries.

  Duplicate Collapsing. Find the content you're looking for faster using more concise structured search results with grouped duplicates.

  Filter by Property. Filter content by configurable properties, including common properties like document type, author, title, size, location, and date of creation or last modification.

  Filter by Language. Retrieve search results that are automatically biased by your language, or pre-select a language to filter your results against.

  Sort by Date. Retrieve the most current information related to your search query.

  E-mail / RSS Alerts. Stay on top of new information relevant to your work by subscribing to update notifications of your most common searches.

• Out-of-the-box Relevancy. Get relevant search results immediately, without extensive configuration, using a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live search.

• Localized Interface. Use a search experience available in the following 25 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

• Extensible Search Experience. Use powerful development tools (including Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer) to build customized query / results experiences and search-enabled applications on the SharePoint platform. For example, alter the appearance of your search site using XLST or enable contextual actions people can take on search results.

Grow and extend your search solution

• No Pre-set Document Limits. Scale your search infrastructure to meet your evolving needs, however big or small they are, using the same search platform across a breadth of server hardware and SQL Server database configurations.

• Continuous Propagation Indexing. Improve the freshness of search results with an index that incrementally updates itself as it crawls information. Newly crawled content is propagated to the query servers immediately, so people can search it without having to wait for all content to be crawled. More Information

  Out-of-the-box Indexing Connectors. Index content on file servers, Web sites, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Exchange Server public folders, and Lotus Notes repositories. Find additional indexing connectors in the Search Connector Gallery.

  Indexing Connector API. Extend searches by indexing information in third-party data repositories, applications, and services.

  Proxy Server Configuration. Configure proxy server settings to be used when crawling information on external sites.

• Federated Search Connectors. Federate searches to indexes in other data repositories, applications, and services, using the Open Search standard. Quickly import or export your federated locations using packaged Federated Location Definition (.FLD) files. Find federated search connectors in the Search Connector Gallery. More Information

  Trigger Words. Configure key phrases to trigger a targeted search of information within a federated index.

  Federated Results Customization. Optionally customize the appearance of your federated search results, using XSL stylesheets.

  Internet Search Integration. Use the same search query experience to retrieve Internet search results from providers supporting the OpenSearch standard via federated search connectors.

• Search iFilters. Index a wide variety of documents and file types, using an interface common across Windows Desktop Search, Windows Vista, SharePoint, and SQL Server.

• Search Connector Gallery. Reference Microsoft's online gallery of third-party federated search connectors, indexing connectors, and iFilters.

• Relevance Tuning. Retrieve the most relevant results from a single search query across a diverse set of third-party line-of-business systems and content repositories. Use a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live Search. More Information

  Metadata Property Mappings. Identify custom metadata properties you want indexed and incorporate them into search results, advanced search options, and search scopes.

  Search Scopes. Define custom sets of search results, based on flexible rules. For example, define a scope that matches information having certain properties (like "people") or from certain content sources (like a specific Web site).

  Authoritative Sources. Identify and rank information sources that are most likely to provide relevant results. Demote non-authoritative sources.

  Definitions. Define editorial text that should appear whenever a key word or phrase is used in a search query.

  Best Bets. Recommend sites that should be returned in the top results whenever a search query matches a key word or phrase found at a site.

  Key words. Define words and phrases that trigger the return of definitions and best bets. Define and audit key word owners, review dates, and expirations for terms that are time-sensitive.

  Synonyms. In your key words, list related terms that should return identical pre-defined results.

• Common Desktop Search Infrastructure. Use a search infrastructure that effectively scales from the desktop, allowing components like iFilters and indexing connectors, used for desktop search, to also be used on the server. Learn more about Windows Desktop Search.

Help secure and manage your search deployment

• Streamlined Installation. Quickly get an enterprise search infrastructure running in your environment, using the simplified installation experience.

• Unified Administration Dashboard. Review common administrative tasks, monitor system and crawl status, and configure your search settings in a single, configurable view. More Information

  Crawl Scheduling. Configure data repositories, applications, and services that you want indexed, and specify crawl schedules for full and incremental crawls.

  Crawler Impact Rules. Limit the performance impact of the search indexer on specific content sources by setting caps on the frequency of or interval between requests.

  Server name mappings. Transpose intranet and extranet site addresses.

  Index Monitoring. For each content source, monitor crawl timings, durations, errors, and average performances over one-week and one-month periods.

  Crawl Logs. On content crawled by the search index, review detailed status reports, which can be filtered by location, date / time, content source, and status.

  System Event Logging. Track system events and roll them up into Microsoft Operations Manager reports.

• Query and Results Reporting. Review your most common searches, queries with no results, top destination pages, query volume, click-through rates, and most-clicked best bets. Identify not only the most popular searches, but also the least successful, and improve them by adding new best bets and content sources.

• High Availability and Load Balancing. Grow your search infrastructure to meet your needs, using a variety of front-end and back-end server topologies. Configure multiple query and clustered database servers to manage performance and ensure reliability.

• Enterprise-ready Backup and Restore. Schedule or perform ad-hoc backups / restores of your configuration data and search index, on premise or remotely.

• Security-trimmed Results. Ensure that people find only the information they should have access to, by automatically trimming search results, based on the identity of the user at query time. Access control lists (ACLs) for content on file shares, SharePoint sites, and Lotus Notes databases are automatically captured at index time.

• Secure Federated Relationships. For your federated search relationships, set global or user-level security settings that support basic, NTLM, Kerberos, forms-based, and cookie-based authentication mechanisms.

• Crawl Rules. Specify unique crawl inclusion / exclusion behaviors and authentication credentials for specific content sources.

• Single-item Index Removal. Quickly remove sensitive content from the search index without having to re-index a content source. Crawl exclusion rules are automatically created to ensure this content isn't re-indexed.

• Breadth of Enterprise Search Solutions. Minimize your investment risk by betting on a common search infrastructure that offers solutions that will grow with you, ranging from a quick, easy, and no-cost search server to a sophisticated business productivity infrastructure. Compare Microsoft's enterprise search offerings.

• Technical Resources. Make use of Microsoft's library of enterprise search technical resources and articles on TechNet and MSDN.

• Community Discussion Groups. Connect with your peers who are implementing Microsoft enterprise search solutions. Participate in community discussion groups here.

• Partner Ecosystem. Take advantage of Microsoft's broad partner ecosystem, with expertise in extending and implementing enterprise search solutions. Find an enterprise search partner.