Federating Search

Federating Search

Sometimes you may have too much content outside of SharePoint or maybe you have a system that already has a capable search engine (i.e.: an ERP or another document management system).  This calls for federated search. As another example, you might use a federated search to display results from your public facing web site or from a public search engine like Bing.  You don’t want to completely index their data, but you would still like to see results from those external systems when searching from SharePoint.  The Federated Search feature allows you to display results from any search engine supporting the OpenSearch 1.1 protocol alongside your local search results.  If you are not familiar with OpenSearch, the results come back as an RSS feed.  Even if your external system doesn’t support OpenSearch, you can write some code to refactor the results as RSS and integrate them easily into SharePoint.  Here is an example, where the federated results come from DotNetMafia.com on the right side of the screen.

Exposing SharePoint Search to other applications

Search Reports

The search reports capture the user behavior information related to the queries on the site.

Trend Reports

1.     Number of Queries: Total number of queries each day.

Rank Reports

1.     Top Queries: Most issued queries per day.

2.     Failed Queries: Most issued queries for which either there were no results or the user did not click on any results.

3.     No Result Queries: Most issued queries for which no results were returned.

Other Reports

1.     Best Bet Suggestion Report: Recommends URLs as most likely results for particular search queries based on analysis of usage patterns. The site administrators can accept or reject these suggestions. If they accept, the corresponding query-URL pair is added to the search keywords list.

2.     Best Bet Usage: Shows how Best Bet suggestions are doing over time. For every Best Bet query issued, the report shows the percentage of clicks on the Best Bet URL compared to other URLs.

3.     Best Bet Action History Report: Tracks the actions performed by the site administrator on the ‘Best Bet Suggestion’ Report.

Report Scope	Site	Site Collection	Web Application	Search Service Application
Number of Queries
Top Queries
Failed Queries
No Result Queries
Best Bet Usage
Best Bet Suggestions
Best Bet Suggestion Action History

Table 2:  Summary of the search reports availability at different SharePoint component hierarchy levels