MOSS 2007 search is a hot topic in our business at the moment and I am confident it will continue to heat up over the year. Many customers and partners have so far been under the impression that Microsoft basically solved all the annoyances we had with SharePoint 2003 search. But some are now starting to hit the wall on some issues. One of these recent issues that has surfaced is wildcard search. MOSS 2007 does to the regret of many still not support this. The search engine does actually support it but the feature is simply not exposed in the new MOSS 2007 search center.
I would like to share a few more unexpected issues that you might not be aware of yet. Well, my intention with this post is actually to try and give you an overview of the improvements Microsoft has to offer in MOSS 2007 search as well as an overview of potential shortcomings that you might encounter.
First of all - I love SharePoint. I also think Microsoft did a really great job improving the SharePoint search engine. It is far superior to the SPS 2003 search engine and can now be compared to the best-of-breed enterpise search engines out there. But the new search user interface still has some serious shortcomings in my eyes.
But let us first have a look at some of the good news you will find in the new MOSS 2007 search engine:
- Relevancy has been improved significantly.
- Improved performance and scalability.
- Continuous propagation of index to search servers during crawl.
- New Business Data Catalog for indexing LOB systems.
- Improved meta data management.
- Duplicate results collapsing.
- Dynamic summaries.
- Automatic hit highlighting of search terms in the title, dynamic summary and in the URL.
- Did you mean?
- Improved search scopes.
- Automatic language detection.
- Option for performing custom security trimming of results.
- Improved and more consistent API for executing searches.
- Complete admin API.
- Improved crawl log.
and some good news to be found in the new search UI:
- Tabbed search.
- Boolean search.
- Improved best bets.
- People search.
- Fixed search.
The above list of improvements is not so new anymore - this you can easily find this elsewhere on the net. But the list of shortcomings that I am about to share with you is not something I have seen anywhere else before. So here it is:
- No wildcard search. As mentioned, the search engine supports it but MS did not expose that feature in the UI.
- Inconsistent search acoss MOSS and WSS. The problem here is that searching the "This site" search scope in the search box take you to the WSS search page in the _layouts page while the MOSS search scopes take you to the search center. In other words you still have two different search interfaces in MOSS.
- Lost search history. Searches initiated from the advanced search page are lost on second click.
- No property value selectors. The advanced search page does not offer a way to let users pick a value from a drop down box on custom properties. It requires the user to know the values a property might assume.
- Weak support for searching content types. The new content type concept is great but it somehow missed the attention of the search UI team in Redmond.
- No result actions. Actions like Alert Me and View details that we knew from SPS 2003 search are gone.
- No result grouping.
- Poor extensibility of the OOB web parts. The problem here is that all the web parts rely on a hidden object that executes the search. This object is declared internal and is therefore inaccessible for you to extend. One obvious thing many would like to do here is to add support for wildcard search without too much effort. But you will because of this architecture need to replicate the entire search UI in order to just add support for this little feature.
- No way of easily jumping to the document library where a document lives. It can be annoying to find a document with search and wanting to perform an action on it. To perform the actions you need to go the document library list item representing the document. But there is no link on a search result to do this.
- No return link. Initiating a search from some site brings you to the MOSS search center. But it does not offer a simple Go Back link allowing the user to return to the site he or she searched from.
- Searching multiple search scopes no longer works. It worked in beta2 and I would expect this to be a bug that MS is likely to fix in the first SP.
Our product Ontolica for MOSS 2007 will offer a fix for these shortcomings as well as including a lot of new useful features. I will tell you in a later post more about how we have decided to solve the issues above.
Notes: I have now been working with MOSS 2007 search for about a year now. I also worked intensively with SPS 2003 search for the development of Ontolica for SharePoint 2003. I have therefore had a significant interest and need to investigate the improvements Microsoft did on search for WSS V3 and MOSS 2007.