Search.  It's definitely a big deal nowadays in this data-driven Information Age.  I would guess that at 25% of my time on the Internet starts with a search of some sort, probably over at the Big G.  And when you have a large number of documents, web pages, or other resources such as forums and wikis, the value of these resources is directly related to your ability to find what you're looking for amongst them.

And there's good news: Search in the current version of SharePoint is really pretty effective.  If you happened to have used a previous version of SharePoint, you know that in the past Search wasn't always a winning proposition.  It didn't always find items it should have (I don't know about you, but this is kind of a deal-breaker for me), often buried the item you needed most way below your top results, and wasn't very easy to manage, extend, or enhance.  But with WSS v3 and MOSS 2007, that story has changed, drastically.

Now you will see much more relevant results for your searches.  You can create alerts when new items enter your search results, or subscribe to an RSS feed for them.  Additionally, you'll get "modern" search functions such as "Did You Mean" prompting, and duplicate collapsing (prevents the same result showing up in multiple lines of your query results).  And this is just what's available in the basic search capabilities of WSS v3.

Probably the best thing in this feature list is the improved results you'll see when you search in SharePoint, wouldn't you say?  Now you have the ability to effectively comb through thousands of your important business documents in seconds and quickly find the one item you need.  (It is important to keep in mind my previous post on the Great Power of Search; you need to remember the things that you don't want people to find.) 

One main reason why Search in WSS v3 has so vastly improved is the fact that it now uses the same search engine as MOSS 2007.  WSS v2 used a search function built in to SQL Server, which was too general to be effective for SharePoint and its performance depended on the version of SQL Server you were using.  SPS 2003 had its own custom search engine optimized for the crawling of document and SharePoint content, although it still wasn't perfect.  But with MOSS 2007, Search is definitely a big deal, so the search engine got a big overhaul and was made available to WSS as well.  It's such a big deal that Microsoft has two licenses available for companies that want to run search technology without also implementing SharePoint sites.  These licenses allow you to use the SharePoint search engine to crawl, index, and query your existing sites, documents, and repositories without having to implement the full MOSS architecture.

Search in MOSS is even more powerful and extendable, and as you may notice with my title for this post, it's still not perfect.  I'll be covering more of the Search differences between WSS and MOSS in subsequent posts, as well as some ideas on how you can improve on what it provides. 

I would also like to thank Rob Bogue of Thor Projects and Leo Doyle of Mondosoft for inspiring this series of posts.  Last week I was able to attend a very informative workshop hosted by Leo where Rob did an excellent presentation on Search in SharePoint and how it can be extended via Mondosoft's Ontolica product.  Please note that other than the free workshop I am receiving no compensation for these posts and hope that fact will be reflected in what I'm writing.