January 12, 2011 |
Q: We don't have the bandwidth to support indexing content at regional sites so are considering using Federated Search. What are the drawbacks?
As depicted in the figure below, Federated Search enables users to execute a search against multiple search engines simultaneously and present the result in multiple webparts on a single search results page.
In the figure above, the user at Regional site 2 executes a query against the web server which forwards the request to the federated search locations at the central farm and Regional site 1. A third request is sent to the local query server. The three search results are then displayed on one page in three different search result.
Pros
The pros of Federated Search are:
- The ability to search across the entire enterprise
- No limits to the number of documents that you can search against
- Content is not crawled at remote site so bandwidth is not impacted.
- Users can search multiple locations simultaneously.
- Sites don't need SharePoint Search 2010 to enable search. Can use less expensive Search Server of SharePoint Foundation.
Cons
- Search relevance is not Enterprise wide. Each search engine calculates it's own relevance - Query response time will be slow based on WAN links.
- As content is not replicated between sites, significant bandwidth will be consumed as users assess the relevance of the search result.
- Users can't use advanced search features such as Refiners
|
|
WRITTEN BY MARTIN MULDOON
 Martin Muldoon, Director of Product Marketing
Send an E-mail |