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Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint: brief discussion
Written by: Margriet Bruggeman, Nikander Bruggeman.
May 1, 2010
Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint: brief discussion
We're amazed at how many times we've been put in a position where we had to defend SharePoint search against customers, end users, and competitors. Questions like: Do you call that horrible thing a document preview? Why isn't faceted search not available out of the box, we're not going to use an open source project from codeplex in a production environment? Indexing document attachments is acting really weird, how come? Why is the number of IFilters so limited? And we could go on, because there's more. Ultimately our answer always comes down to the following: SharePoint Search is an advanced search mechanism that provides good value for your money, since you don't need to pay separate license fees. If you're not happy with it, you need to invest more money.
Additional search investments come in two flavors: there have been products that are add-ons to SharePoint search and most often concentrate on providing user interface enhancements, and there have been products that replace SharePoint search altogether. One thing we want to comment though is that high-end enterprise search features come at a high-end price. If you're wondering what exactly constitutes a high-end enterprise search system, to us it's a search solution that indexes anything you want, and as much of it as you want, while still being able to infer intelligent relations from content and metadata. Later, we will talk a bit more about the specific strength points of Fast.
We guess Microsoft realized it didn't have a real solution for the high-end enterprise search market and that that led them to the acquisition of the Norwegian company Fast, which specializes in delivering search services for the high-end market. According to Gartner, Fast is even more: it's the best enterprise search system in the world. The acquisition was announced in January 2008 and ultimately, in SharePoint 2010, this has lead to a fully SharePoint-integrated solution called Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint is an add-on, which means you can start using the normal SharePoint Enterprise Search features as long as you want and switch to Fast once you need high-end search features. You can do this by adding two new search service applications:
- A service application for the FAST Query interface, which is used by each WFE.
- A service application for the FAST Content Gathering interface, which is used by the SharePoint Gatherer process.
At this point we still feel that the awesome power of Fast is still not adequately translated to the SharePoint 2010 user interface, but we believe this is a matter of time. The following is a small list of things Fast is really good at:
- It has a fully customizable indexing pipeline. This makes it easy to determine which components should be added to a pipeline or add your own via scripts. You can also define multiple indexing pipelines. Overall, the Fast indexing pipeline architecture gives great control over the indexing process.
- It supports many different kinds of document types and document attachments.
- It's able to handle very large documents as well as huge amounts of data. A Fast employee once told us proudly that they had just finished indexing Norway, which equated to 40 Yottabyte.
- It's great at inferring hidden relationships based on content and metadata.
- The scale-up and scale-out facilities of Fast are quite fantastic.
- Visual Best Bets. A normal Best Bet is shown if an end user enters a particular search term. Visual Best Bets also allow you to define best bets that are visual, such as an image, or a video.
- And, oh yeah, it offers a Preview function in SharePoint 2010 (although we're still not convinced it's a great one).
You can add multiple Fast servers to your SharePoint 2010 farm. Based on preliminary information, you can expect each node to handle up to 30 million documents. Once you have set up the required infrastructure, you can go ahead and create a new site based on the FAST Search Center site template.