Many organizations implement SharePoint for a number of different reasons including collaboration, content management, business intelligence, process improvement, and many others. These are areas where organizations are leveraging the vast capabilities of SharePoint 2010 to allow their users to work smarter and not harder.

But one area that many organizations seem to forget about is the powerful enterprise search capabilities that are available out of the box with SharePoint 2010. Search tends to be one of those areas with SharePoint that “just works,” so what usually happens in an organization is that the farm gets setup and search gets configured — results come back and it is assumed that everything must be working. Right? This approach is very common which is why when I go to work with different companies I often hear the same story about how “Search is broken” or “search sucks.” But the fact of the matter is that in order to work to its full potential, search can’t be entirely an afterthought. However, getting better results from search doesn’t require a lot of effort.

The new search refinement panel in SharePoint 2010 search is pretty cool! When you fire up a search you can see the various pieces of metadata that match the search results and then drill down from there.

But what if you want to add your own? Well its actually very easy if the column type that you want to add is Managed Metadata. If you are adding other columns types you have to do it the old SharePoint 2007 way where you have to crawl the property, create a managed property, do the mapping and then add the XML into the Refinement Panel.

One of the most common complaints about SharePoint search in MOSS 2007 was the inability to use Wildcards and Boolean Operators when performing search queries.  Both of these capabilities were supported by the search API but required either custom code or 3rd Party Search Utilities to take advantage of this. 

The good news is that SharePoint 2010 now supports both Wildcards and Boolean Operators when performing search queries!  What does this mean? 

Information retrieval experts define relevance as having two components; Precision and Recall In an Enterprise setting it is difficult to achieve acceptable measures in either. Here’s why:

Precision

When a user runs a two or three word query, there will be many documents that contain those terms. Naturally only a few of those documents will be relevant to you. This results in a very lengthy list of hits that the user must troll through. Precision is the measure of how many of these hits are actually relevant. Typically most people use the first page in the search result to measure this since most people wont’ even bother to go past the first page move on to page.