Last week I met up with Leonid
(MCS SharePoint consultant) whom has a great upfront and practical view on life.
Funny guy.
He mentioned to me about a SharePoint Faceted Search – which is a series of Search
Web Parts that drill into the Search Index and return metadata tags, content types
and a bunch of other stuff to give you accurate search results grouped by Author,
Content Type, etc. (what ever you want)
Add them to the search results page of your SharePoint Search and you’re away. The
webparts examine the Query String and have a bunch of customisations that allow you
to tweak it just the way you like.
Great work Leonid!!!! (he’s
a very clever guy – SharePoint Search is one of his passionsRed Wine is the other
🙂 )
Standard View – notice the red regions, categories with the exact
number of results. Where std. search says “..about 512 results”
Adding a Couple of Categories – and looking at Content Type Search.
Here I clicked on Author – Mick Badran and a Content Type of ’Word’. You can see how
the ’advanced search’ is being visually built for me.
The best thing I like about all of this is that the RHS Web Part is totally customisable.
The results all come from an XML File (property of the webpart) that you can customise
– we can have icons, map different words/terms for things like ’Word’ as a content
type.
You can even add/remove your own.
The webpart has collapsible sections to it (you can even set how many items you want
visible when collapse in the section!) and the collapsing/expanding is driven off
Javascript calls back to the Server, so no round tripping.
Simply download, install the Solution, Activate the Feature for your Site Collection
and add the Web Parts to your page. Easy as that to get started.
Brilliant – absolutely Brilliant (I’ve already had some of our users
emailing me to say how easy it is)
Grab them here from CodePlex – http://www.codeplex.com/Wikipage?ProjectName=FacetedSearch
—- snip from the CodePlex Main Page —-
Project Description
MOSS Faceted Search is a set of web parts that provide intuitive way to refine search
results by category (facet).
The facets are implemented using SharePoint API and stored within native SharePoint
METADATA store. The solution demonstrates following key features:
- Grouping search results by facet
- Displaying a total number of hits per facet value
- Refining search results by facet value
- Update of the facet menu based on refined search criteria
- Displaying of the search criteria in a Bread Crumbs
- Ability to exclude the chosen facet from the search criteria
- Flexibility of the Faceted search configuration and its consistency with MOSS administration