First, some background A few years ago Comperio launched a nifty service for Posten Norge, Norway’s postal service. Through the service, retail companies can upload their catalogues and seasonal flyers to make the products listed within searchable. Although the catalogue handling and processing is also very interesting, we’re going to focus on the search side [...]
Getting the correct result at the top of your search results isn’t easy. Anyone working within search quickly realizes this. Tuning the underlying ranking model is a job that just doesn’t end. There is an entire profession about search engine optimization, making sure your site gets as high as possible on Google (and Bing, I [...]
…that came out of nowhere, worked its way to the top, and then all of a sudden earlier this year disappeared for good. Time has come to say farewell.
Last week we were trying to track down a document that, based on customer feedback, must have been lost somewhere between the content source and the index. By turning on the Fast Pipeline stage FFDdumper and doing a full crawl we determined that the document at least had made it to the FAST pipeline. Our [...]
Comperio consultant, Marcus Johansson, co-authors ‘Working with Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint’. As most search techies will testify, the life of a consultant working on complex enterprise search projects with large customers, can be quite a demanding one. To commit to investing personal time, outside of all this project work is, to put [...]
I found this interview (article from Nov. 2011) with the Director of Microsoft’s Enterprise Search Group, Bjørn Olstad on http://www.tu.no. Below is an English summary of the main points, along with some elbaorations. Dr. Olstad speaks on how Norway is a hotbed for search technology development and this search ecosystem has it’s source at NTNU in [...]
[Originally posted at: http://techmikael.blogspot.com/2011/05/document-thumbnails-and-powerpoint.html] Microsoft offers three different flavors of search for SharePoint 2010: Foundation, Standard and Enterprise. For each level upwards you get more feature and better search capabilities. One of the visual features included with FAST for SharePoint is Thumbnails and Previews for the search results, as listed on the comparison table below (Compare [...]
Technology has no inherent business value. Technology doesn’t provide improved findabiliy, decision-making or knowledge management by itself. Technology just provides features that help users perform tasks, thereby reaching their goals. Only when user goals and business goals align, can you hope to create business value. Without people, there is no purpose – and without purpose, [...]
I was teaching a FAST for SharePoint Workshop today and we were doing labs on creating and mapping crawled properties to managed properties with the FAST Administration UI and via PowerShell. But one student wanted to know how to do this in code, hence this blog post. Instead of having a deployment script creating your [...]
Adding query suggestions to your search solution is a feature that can contribute to a better search experience for end-users. First of all, it makes us save time as we don’t have to type in the entire query. Secondly, it can help the user avoid potential spelling errors, which in turn can reduce the quality of the [...]
