Search Solutions Comparison

By Karthick
Features Comparison between FAST Search Server vs SharePoint 2010 Search

Search Requirement
When searched in English, if the meaning of the words match content in any other language
(Arabic for example), such Arabic results are returned and are translated and shown as well
Multimedia content like Images and Video can be searched using their file size, file format and
incase of videos - the length of the video
Transliteration Search
Facetted Search
Search Results should display thumbnails of documents
Search Results should display thumbnails of multi media content

Relevance Search
Search can search within external file shares
Search can search within Exchange Public Folders
Search within Exchange Private Mailboxes
Search can crawl external websites
Search allows Boolean Logic
Search allows Relational Operators to be used
Search using Properties
Find content of a particular language
Search using Best Bets (highlights results matching predefined keywords)
Visual Best Bets
Searches inside Email boxes of the currently logged in user
Search results are based on Relevance

Relevancy tuning by document or site promotions

Search enhancements based on user context
Continuous Search (background engine searches for matching results and alerts the user)
Search Events are to be recorded
Similar searches done by others in the recent past to be shown
Based on predefined keywords, matching results to be alerted to the Supervisor, the Supervisor
can then decide to retain this or discard, log of such discarded items to be kept as well

Stop Word Removal

Phonetic Search
Lemmatization

Automatic Spelling Correction

Similar results
Sort results on managed properties or rank profiles
Basic results refinement
Deep results refinement (based on metadata)

Document preview and thumbnails

Rich Web indexing support

Sophisticated Property Extraction

Morphologic

Results Transformation
Lotus Notes, Documentum, JDBC Connectors
Item Level Scale
 Compliance
SharePoint 2010 FAST

No No

No No
No No
No Yes
Yes Yes
No No

Yes, limited Yes

Yes Yes
Yes No
No No
Yes Yes
Yes Yes
Yes Yes
Yes Yes
Yes Yes
Yes Yes
Yes, limited Yes
No No
No Yes

Yes, limited Yes

No Yes
No No
Yes Yes
No No

To Customize To Customize

No Yes

No Yes
No Yes

No Yes
No Yes
No Yes
Yes Yes
No Yes

No Yes
No Yes

Yes, limited Yes

No Yes

No Yes
No Yes
100 million 500 million
Remarks

3rd party - Autonomy Search

3rd party - Autonomy Search - to an extent
Check screenshot

FAST:Conceptual Searching, metadata extraction, pipeline control, rules

based relevance, facetted navigation.

3rd party - Longitude Exchange Connector; http://www.ba-insight.net/connector-feature-matrix.htm

FAST Shows a section of relevant information along with the search results

Promote selected documents or sites as highly relevant results for a

keyword. Demote documents or sites to give lower rank. (Limited: promote
documents for a given site, not query specific.)
Scopes Best Bets, visual Best Bets, and document promotions and demotions to a sub-group of em

A query for “President of United States”

would also match documents mentioning “The President
of the United States”.
Phonetic search will detect all possible variants of
“Muamar Gadaffi”( Muammar Al Ghaddafi; Muammar
Al Qaddafi; Muammar Al Qaddafi; Muammar El Qaddafi;
Muammar Gadaffi; Muammar Gadafy; Muammar
Gadafy, etc.)

“floghts to London” should still be taken to

responses to a search for “flights to London” rather
than having to click on a “did you mean…?” dialog
box
Generates a new search based on the selected search result
Sort results based on selected managed properties or by FAST Query
Language (FQL) formula. Rank Profile: The relevancy of a document with
respect to a
query is represented by a ranking value. A rank profile
concept enables full control of the relative weight of
each component for a given query (e.g., How important
is the title relative to the body of the article?). This
enables individual relevance tuning of different
query applications.

Display thumbnails of Word and PowerPoint documents. Display inline

(scrollable) previews of PowerPoint files on the results page.
Indexing of wide variety of Web content, including Javascript.
Extracts key information (people names, locations, company names) from
unstructured text to use as additional managed properties. (Limited: title,
author, and date only.)
including all forms of a given word via
linguistic normalization (lemmatization)
This is the algorithmic processing of search results.
It includes result-set reordering (e.g., duplicate removal),
adding navigation information (e.g., clustering/drilldown),
and result content conversion or reformatting.
ctor-feature-matrix.html

s to a sub-group of employees