This document summarizes the key changes to search in SharePoint 2013 compared to previous versions like FAST. The main changes include a new unified search architecture with improved user experience, extensibility through new APIs, and a focus on continuous crawling and analytics. Components like the crawl, index, and query processing were overhauled for better performance and scale.

1. OSLO STOCKHOLM LONDON BOSTON SINGAPORE
Sökmotorn i
SharePoint 2013
Mer än bara FAST

2. Marcus Johansson
• Senior Consultant, Comperio
• V-TSP Enterprise Search, Microsoft
• Course instructor, Cornerstone
Email: marcus.johansson@comperiosearch.com
Twitter: @marcjoha
Blog: http://blog.comperiosearch.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusjohansson

3. WHAT HAPPENED TO FAST?
FAST was a true Enterprise Search platform, so…

4. The evolution of FAST
FDS ESP
FSIS
FSIA
FS4SP
Search in
SP2013
Search in
SP2010
Secret sauce
(incl. Mars)

5. End of an era, birth of a New age
• FAST now “fully integrated” into SP2013
– True, but there’s more!
• No longer a “FAST license”
– SP2013 contains everything
– Enterprise version
1997 – 2013

6. Empowering
the whole
SharePoint
experience
Better, more
powerful
extensibility
Major user
experience
overhaul
Main themes of the new Search
• User Experience is finally a key component
Vastly
improved
search core
Finally a
single search
architecture

7. User Experience is finally key
• Revamped user/admin interface
• Hover panels, previews
• Query rules, result blocks
• Result types, display templates
• “You’ve seen this result before”
• Query Builder
• Content Search web part
• Etc.

8. For the first time,
Search isn’t defined by the
nuts and bolts,
but from the User Experience
and high-level tools around it.

9. SHAREPOINT 2013’s
SEARCH EXPERIENCE
Examining

10. The search center

11. Build and extend
• With the new Content Search Web part (CSWP)
• With the new REST APIs

12. NEW SEARCH ARCHITECTURE
Examining SharePoint 2013’s

13. Search architecture
Public API
Unit of scale/role boundary
Extensibility Points
Crawl
Admin
Link
Analytics
Reporting

14. The search components
• A “node” is an instance of a component
• Scale by adding nodes

15. REST service architecture
• Directly interact with SharePoint artifacts by
using any technology supporting REST
• Also:
– CSOM JavaScript, Silverlight
– SSOM Managed code

16. The new Search Service Application

17. Keeping it all together
Services Processes
Process name Description
hostcontrollerservice.exe Process controller. Monitors and restarts children.
noderunner.exe A search component (except the crawl component)
mssearch.exe The crawl component.

18. Crawl component
• Changes from SP2010
– Improved performance
– Continuous crawl
• Improves freshness
– Crawl Log
• More details
• Document removal
– Crawl Health Report
• Huge improvement!Crawl
mssearch.exe

19. Continuous crawls
• Not event-driven indexing
• Starts crawl regardless of prior crawl session
• Large change sets no longer bad for freshness
• Only available for SharePoint content types
– Possible to crawl SP 2010 and 2007
time
Continuous
Full and
incremental
Default 15 min

20. Crawl health reports
Rate Latency Freshness
CPU and
memory
load
Content
Processing
activity
Etc.
Crawl rate per type Crawl load

21. Content processing component
• Schema mapping
– Crawled  Managed
properties
• Entity extraction
– Companies and custom
• Advanced Filter Pack is gone
– PDFs are out of the box
• Extensible through web service
• Internally: processing flows
– Replaces Python pipeline
Link

22. Processing flow execution

23. Index component
• Propriety disk-based index
• Discrete portions called
partitions
• 1 partition per 10M docs
• Each partition contains 1+
replicas for fault-tolerance
and query volume
• 1 replica, 1 server
• All servers perform indexing
(partially in-memory)

24. Example: Partitions and replicas
Same content
Different content

25. Query processing component
• Prepares the queries
– Query rules
– Result sources
– Linguistics/dictionaries
– Etc.
• Manipulates the results
– Display templates
– Late security trimming
– Etc.
• Internally: processing flows
– No custom processing as in Content Processing
– Still MAJOR improvement

26. Query rules
• For a certain term  trigger certain action:
– Add/change query terms
– Use alternate sorting/relevance
– Hybrid search (or other federated results)
– Etc.
• Replaces search keywords in SP2010
• Configure at farm, site collection or site-level

27. Query builder
• Easily builds KQL
– CSWP, result sources, query rules, etc.

28. Query client types
• Adjust throttling per client type

29. Query health reports
Trend Overall
Latency in
main flow
Latency in
each
subflow
Index times Etc.
Latency per processing node in SharePoint flow

30. Analytics processing component
• Analyzes crawled items and search usage
• Updates index without re-indexing documents
• Result: relevance becomes self-learning
– Also: search reports and recommendations
Link
Analytics
Reporting

31. Search reports
• Self-learning relevance aside,
never underestimate manual effort!
– Query rules, synonyms, boosts, etc.
• Automatic reports:
– Number of queries
– Top queries
– Abandoned queries
– No-result queries
– Query rule usage

32. Search administration component
• Provisions other search components
• Talks to Admin database on behalf of:
Crawl, Content and Query processing
components
• In previous FAST products, it was hard to make
the admin component redundant
– Not the case in SP2013!
– Scale appropriately
Admin

33. Hardware properties
• Highlights
– In-memory technology
– VMs now supported for production
– SANs less problematic
Component CPU Memory Disk I/O Network
Crawl Medium Medium Medium High
Content processing High High Medium
Index High High High Medium
Query processing Low Medium Medium
Analytics processing Medium Medium Medium High
Search administration Low Low Low Low

34. Questions?
Håll utkik på vår blogg!
blog.comperiosearch.com
Email: marcus.johansson@comperiosearch.com
Twitter: @marcjoha
Blog: http://blog.comperiosearch.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusjohansson