Been asked about the abilities of FAST Search Server; thought I’d share the following with you. The FAST Search Server can give advanced search capabilities to SharePoint 2010.

  • Synonyms: SharePoint 2010 allows for one way synonyms, FAST extends this concept to allow for one and two way synonyms.
  • Property Extraction: This automatically pulls key information such as company and people from item and create properties.
  • Rank Profiles: Allow administrators to change the ranking algorithm by adjusting how much weight is given to attributes such as freshness, proximity, authority, rank and other attributes.
  • Document Thumbnails: Word and PowerPoint presentations can be viewed directly from within search results
  • Visual Best Bets: Best bets can be configured to contain rich interactive elements
  • Result Collapsing: Documents that are identical (have identical checksum) will be shown as collapsed and will have the ability to expand the results and see all versions of the result
  • Relevancy Tuning By Document or Site Promotion: Within a FAST search results page users can choose to promote items with the result set that will then increase the visibility of the item when another search occurs.
  • Sort on Managed Properties: Users can sort on any managed property within a FAST results page (standard search only allow sorting by date or relevance)
  • Similar Results: A link is provided to similar results for greater search clarity.

Capabilities

Feature

SharePoint Foundation 2010

Search Server 2010 Express

Search Server 2010

SharePoint Server 2010

FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

Basic search

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Best Bets

 

Y

Y

Y

Y

Visual Best Bets

       

Y

Similar Results

       

Y

Duplicate Results

       

Y

Search Scopes

 

Y

Y

Y

Y

Search Enhancement based on user context

       

Y

Crawled and Managed Properties

 

Y

Y

Y

Y*

Query Federation

 

Y

Y

Y

Y

Query Suggestions

 

Y

Y

Y

Y

Sort Results on Managed Properties or Rank Profiles

       

Y

Relevancy Tuning by Document or Site Promotions

 

Y

Y

Y

Y*

Shallow Results Refinement

 

Y

Y

Y

Y

Deep Results Refinement

       

Y

Document Preview

       

Y

Windows 7 Federation

 

Y

Y

Y

Y

People Search

     

Y

Y

Social Search

     

Y

Y

Taxonomy Integration

     

Y

Y

Multi-Tenant Hosting

     

Y

Y

Rich Web Indexing Support

       

Y