Swiss IT Professional and TechNet Blog : Search

Bing Add-on for Firefox

mepprecht — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:54:49 GMT

If your are using Firefox, the Microsoft Search Team have developed an add-in to allow you to make your default search engine Bing.

You can download it from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10434

The add-on has already over 488’000 downloads!

Microsoft Bing - The Decision Engine

mepprecht — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:24:18 GMT

Introducing Bing Search by Microsoft. A Decision Engine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et0rUzRAXGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK5IYlZECmE

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/presscentre/pressreleases/ProductLaunchPR_280509.mspx

So from 3 June 2009, don’t Google It, or Live It, Bing It!

iFilters for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows Desktop Search

mepprecht — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:40:16 GMT

Quite often, customers and partners ask about iFilters. For those who don’t know what an iFilter is, well, when a Indexing Service needs to index the contents of a file, it needs to know what the format of the file is. A PDF file has a different format to a DOC or DOCX file. An iFilter file contains the meta-data so that the Indexing Service understand the file. More information on iFilters is available on the MSDN site.

For some good lists of iFilters, visit one of the 2 sites:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2008/02/07/ifilter-pack-for-indexing-for-sharepoint-server-2007-search-and-sqlfts.aspx
und
http://www.ifilter.org/ (This site has some advertising content on it, but the site does have some interesting links to iFilters)

Adobe PDF iFilter for 64bit

mepprecht — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:38:11 GMT

Eventually! Adobe has released a 64bit version of it’s PDF iFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Up till now, your only options were Adobe’s 32 bit version, or buy the 32- or 64-bit version from Foxit Software.

Feedback from the field indicates that the Foxit iFilter seems to achieve higher performance, but the Adobe iFilter is free. So go and test yourself and see what your experience is.

(The article was originally posted on the German Language Swiss IT Professional and TechNet Blog by Stefan Hagenbuch)

Problems with the display of Search results (Search Server 2008 / MOSS)

mepprecht — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:33:38 GMT

Some partners have reported problems with the Search results display.

The 1st search request on a Search Portal on Search Server 2008 appears very quickly. The system shows the elapsed time as 0.05 seconds. So far, so good. If a user performs another search, this action takes 1-2 minutes to complete, even though the system says it also took 0.05 seconds

So the question is, where is the Problem? Is it Internet Explorer, Search Server, or networking. It looks like the problem is a combination of Federated Search and Proxy Server settings. By default, there are 2 “Federated Search” WebParts on the page.

Our tip: If you do not use Federated Search, remove the WebParts from the page.

If you use Federated Search, then you should ensure that the Search Sever has access to the Internet. If you use a proxy server, set the IP address of the Proxy Server in the Search Server (Search Administration > Proxy and Timeouts)

(The article was originally posted on the German Language Swiss IT Professional and TechNet Blog by Stefan Hagenbuch)