Microsoft SharePoint Server- Part V

We hope that it is clear to all of us from our previous blog that the main purpose of enterprise search of SharePoint Server is to provide enhanced searching capabilities by gathering, querying, and indexing with support for SQL query syntax. We also enlisted the features available in SharePoint Enterprise Search with just a mention about its architectural components. We are back again to let you know the functionalities of each of its architectural components.

The below picture provides us the detailed view of the architecture.

From the diagram it is clear that the SharePoint Enterprise Search Engine in itself has got several components and each one has its own responsibilities during searching process. We will entail them one by one here:

Index Engine:
This engine forms the backbone of the search by filtering out the text and the properties from the content that is gathered during enterprise search and indexes them for faster search.

Query Engine:
This engine takes the responsibility of determining whether to apply keyword-based search or SQL-based search and executes those queries and renders the result for the search data in appropriate format.

Protocol Handlers & IFilters:
As the name of the component suggest, this engine opens up the content and document by checking their respective format and filter the documents based on the search request.

Content Index:
This engine extracts the words and other details from the content item, indexes, and stores them. It actually maintains a property store that is used to store a table of details and its corresponding values.

Search Configuration Data:
This part of the enterprise search architecture actually provides best bets, keywords, and property schema information to the query engine and gets scopes and crawler logs from the protocol handler. Thus this engine maintains all the configuration information for the content and aids in servicing the enterprise search for rendering the results.

Wordbreakers & Stemmers:
The wordbreakers and stemmers do language-specific analysis for finding out the boundaries of words based on the specific rules of that language on lexicon. Then, these lengthy compound words are split up and indexed in order to reduce the size and helps in better querying. The stemmers are actually there to store the words in its inflectional forms. If no word breakers are specified for a particular language, then by default punctuational symbol or white space would be used for word breaking.

Let us all stay tuned for more details as there are yet more to come on SharePoint Server Enterprise Search.