UI Improvement
Without having to open each search result, users can quickly identify useful results in ways such as the following:
- Users can rest the pointer over a search result to preview the document content in the hover panel to the right of the result.
- Users can quickly distinguish search results based on their type. For example, Microsoft Office documents display the application icon in front of the title of the search result. Newsfeed conversation results display the number of replies and the number of likes to the right. Site results list the top links that users often click on the site. People in results show the picture and the Lync availability status to the left.
- By default, certain types of related results are displayed in groups called result blocks. A result block contains a small subset of results that are related in a particular way. For example, results that are PowerPoint documents appear in a result block when the word "presentation" is one of the search terms. Administrators and site owners can also create result blocks to group other results. Like individual search results, you can promote result blocks or rank them with other results.
Search helps users quickly return to important sites and documents by remembering what they have previously searched and clicked. The results of previously searched and clicked items are displayed as query suggestions at the top of the results page.
In addition to the default manner in which search results are differentiated, site collection administrators and site owners can create and use result types to customize how results are displayed for important documents. A result type is a rule that identifies a type of result and a way to display it.
Site collection administrators and site owners can use display templates to customize the appearance of search results by using an HTML editor, and they can customize the behavior of search results by using JavaScript. They can specify display templates that determine how result types appear.
Relevance Improvement
A search result, suggestion, or recommendation is more relevant when it better satisfies the intent of the person who issues the query. SharePoint Server 2013 improves relevance in areas such as freshness of search results, linguistics, and document parsing. It also improves relevance in the following areas:
- New ranking models
- Analysis of content and user interaction
- Query rules
- Result sources
New Search Architecture
SharePoint Server 2013 introduces a new search architecture that includes significant changes and additions to the search components and databases. For examples and more information, see the Search technical diagrams in Technical diagrams for SharePoint 2013.
Search health report
SharePoint Server 2013 provides many query health reports and crawl health reports. In SharePoint Server 2010 and FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, similar reports were called Search Administration Reports. For more information, see View search diagnostics in SharePoint Server 2013.
More flexible search schema
By defining crawled properties, managed properties, and the mappings between them, the search schema determines how the properties of crawled content are saved to the search index. Crawled properties and how these are mapped to managed properties define how to transform crawled content into managed properties. The search index stores the contents of the managed properties. The attributes of the managed properties determine the search index structure.
SharePoint Server 2013 introduces new attributes that you can apply to managed properties, such as sortable and refinable. The sortable attribute reduces the time that is required to return large search result sets by sorting results before they are returned. The refinable attribute enables you to create a refiner based on a particular managed property.
In SharePoint Server 2013, you can have multiple search schemas. The main search schema is defined at the Search service application level. Site collection administrators can create customized search schemas for different site collections.
For more information, see Manage the search schema in SharePoint Server 2013.
Changes in Crawling
SharePoint Server 2013 includes many changes and improvements related to crawling content.
Continuous Crawl
In SharePoint Server 2013, you can configure crawl schedules for SharePoint content sources so that crawls are performed continuously. Setting this option eliminates the need to schedule incremental crawls and automatically starts crawls as necessary to keep the search index fresh. Administrators should still configure full crawls as necessary. For more information, see Manage continuous crawls in SharePoint Server 2013.
Host distribution rules removed
In SharePoint Server 2010, host distribution rules are used to associate a host with a specific crawl database. Because of changes in the search system architecture, SharePoint Server 2013 does not use host distribution rules. Instead, Search service application administrators can determine whether the crawl database should be rebalanced by monitoring the Databases view in the crawl log.
Removing items from search index
In SharePoint Server 2010, Search service application administrators could remove items from the search index by using Search Result Removal. In SharePoint Server 2013, you can remove items from the search index only by using the crawl logs.
