In the FAST search system, an item processing service performs required processing on content retrieved to prepare it for indexing. Examples of item processing are mapping of crawled properties to managed properties, parsing of document formats, linguistic normalization of text, and normalization of...

February seems to be the favored month for Search roadmap updates in Microsoft. On Feb 10, 2009 the Microsoft Unveils New Enterprise Search Road Map press release disclosed a detailed road map from Microsoft for its enterprise search products, including the introduction of FAST Search for SharePoint...

Continuing the discussion on document processing , this post focusses on the document processing engine in FAST ESP. The Document Processing Engine provides processing of documents through customizable document processing pipelines . The Engine consists of multiple document processing pipelines. Any...

Besides the architectural differences and feature set, transitioning from SharePoint to FAST ESP involves knowing the differences in terminology also. The term – “ Document ” is just one of the many examples available. This post is about what a document is in FAST ESP. In the following...

Microsoft's Enterprise Search website contains information on search products, including FAST ESP . You can also read about the Enteprise search solutions - Enterprise Search for Internet Business and Enterprise Search for Business Productivity here. Speaking of the amount of technical content on...

Content retrieval is done very differently in FAST then in SharePoint 2007. FAST ESP may retrieve content from the data sources using two broad approaches: 1) Content Pull : this approach leverages content connectors to retrieve the information via standard APIs or interfaces provided by the source...

Relevancy is the measure of how well a set of documents (results) answers or addresses the intent of a given query. When there are many query matches, the search engines must rank the results by relevance score, sorting the results listing so that the pages most likely to be useful will appear first...

FAST ESP performs linguistic processing: at the document level – during document processing, and at the query level – during query and result processing This helps it provide more relevant search results to users. On the query side, linguistic processing results in a query transformation...

FAST ESP is a feature rich search platform; no doubt about that. To give my readers, especially SharePoint 2007 developers/architects, an idea of what it provides, given below are some of FAST ESP features in an alphabetical order: Capability Description Advanced Linguistics...

FAST ESP is built on a distributed system architecture that enables any type of information to be accessed through core search and filter engines. Incoming content is fed through a number of processors that automatically extract information, generate document summaries, and utilize metadata information...

This is the first post from a planned series on the FAST ESP platform to increase product awareness in the SharePoint community. This post builds on the basic FAST information I shared in my blog post – “ FAST and SharePoint 2007 ” last month. Target Segment The enterprise search market is broken...

For some time, I have been working on pre-sales engagements for FAST search based solutions. I get lot of queries from SharePoint developers/architects - what is "FAST" and how it works with SharePoint etc. I am sharing some information below. The links within this post will take you to webpages with...