Search Server 2010 enables end users to create and run more effective search queries. It also enables users to issue search queries from the desktop in Windows 7.

• Boolean query syntax for free-text queries and for property queries. Search Server 2010 supports use of the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT in search queries. For example, a user can execute a query such as the following: (“SharePoint Search” OR “Live Search”) AND (title:”Keyword Syntax” OR title:”Query Syntax”)
• Prefix matching for search keywords and document properties. Search queries can use the * character as a wildcard at the end of a text string. For example, the search query “micro*” would find documents that contain “Microsoft” or “microchip,” and the query “author:bi*” would find documents that contain “Bill” or “Bing.” Therefore, the query “micro* author:bi*” would find documents that contain both “Microsoft” and “Bill Gates.”
• Suggestions while typing search queries. As a user types keywords in the Search box, the Search Center provides suggestions to help complete the query. These suggestions are based on past queries from other users.
• Suggestions after users run queries. The Search Center provides improved “did you mean” suggestions in case keywords in a search query appear not to be what the user intended. In addition, when the search system returns results for a query, the Search Center provides suggestions for related searches.
• Connectors for enterprise search in Windows 7. After a search of SharePoint sites finishes, a user can easily create a connector for that search in Windows 7. The same search from Windows 7 then finds the relevant documents from the most recent crawl of those SharePoint sites. Users can take advantage of Windows features such as file preview and drag-and-drop for documents returned in those search results.

Search Server 2010 provides many improvements for getting and viewing search results.

• Results display. The search results page includes a refinement panel, which provides a summary of search results and enables users to quickly browse and understand the results. For example, for a particular search query, the summary in the refinement panel might show that there are many Web pages in the search results and many documents by a particular author. A summary might also indicate that there are primarily Microsoft Word documents in the top 50 search results, followed by a particular number of Microsoft Excel documents. The refinement panel also enables users to filter results — for example, by kind of content (document, spreadsheet, presentation, Web page, and so on), content location (such as SharePoint sites), content author, or date last modified. A user can also filter by category based on managed properties and enterprise content management (ECM) taxonomy nodes that an administrator configures.
• Enhancements for relevance of search results. Search Server 2010 provides improvements to increase the relevance and usefulness of search results, such as the following:
  
  
  • Ranking based on search results history. If a document in a search results set was visited from a search results page much more often than other documents, the document is promoted in the ranking of search results.
  • Relevance based on inferred metadata. Following a crawl, document metadata is parsed as part of the indexing process. In some cases, the search system can also infer metadata from the content of a document. This can be helpful when a document’s explicit metadata is missing or incorrect. For example, the template of a Microsoft PowerPoint document might not specify an author, but the search system might infer the author from a phrase in the document such as “By John Doe.” 

After an Advanced installation, the Farm Configuration Wizard runs automatically. This wizard helps simplify deployment of small farms. It provides the option to automate much of the initial configuration process with default settings. For example, when you use the Farm Configuration Wizard to deploy the first server in a farm, the wizard automatically creates a fully functional search system on that server, which includes:

• A search topology that can support an index of up to 10 million crawled documents.
• A Search Center from which users can issue queries. This Search Center is created automatically if the person installing the product selects this option in the wizard.

The search system can crawl local SharePoint sites (sites in the server farm) immediately after the Farm Configuration Wizard finishes running.

In Search Server 2008, the Office SharePoint Server Search service was contained in the Shared Services Provider (SSP). In that architecture, you could not create a new Search service without creating a new SSP. In contrast, in Search Server 2010, you can create and manage Search service applications independently. A Search service application requires no host such as an SSP.

You can automate many search administration tasks by using Windows PowerShell 2.0 scripts. For example, you can use Windows PowerShell 2.0 scripts to manage content sources and search system topology.

Search Server provides many new ways to configure and optimize a search solution for better performance, capacity, and reliability.

Scalability for increased crawling capability

Scalability for increased throughput and reduced latency

Topology management during normal operations

Search Server 2010 provides new capabilities for monitoring farm operations and customizing reports.

Health and performance monitoring

Report customization

Search Server 2010 can search content in repositories other than SharePoint sites by crawling or federating. For example, the search system can do the following:

• Crawl content in repositories such as file shares, Exchange public folders, and Lotus Notes.
• Use federation for access to search results that are gathered by other crawlers or search engines. An administrator might federate search results from www.bing.com or from a geographically distributed internal location, for example.