FAST Search Result Ordering

This is just a quick placeholder that I will embellish more when I get my FAST development environment running….

 

When getting search results, I found that the default relevancy for FAST for SharePoint had equal weighting for words found in the body as well as the title.  This seems a little strange, because in the past (need to confirm this) SharePoint always weighted words found in titles as MORE important. 

The way to fix this is to tweak the relevancy rankings 

$RankProfile = Get-FASTSearchMetadataRankProfile -Name "Default"

$content= $RankProfile.GetFullTextIndexRanks()|where-Object -filterscript {$_.FullTextIndexReference.Name -eq "content"}

$mpTitle = Get-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Name "Title"

$content.SetImportanceLevelWeight(7, 200)

$content.ContextWeight = 200

$content.Update()

 

Once again…examples and screen shots coming. 

FAST Synonym Hit Highlighting

I recently worked on a FAST Search implementation and found a couple of gotcha’s that I wanted to note. 

First, FAST search does not do hit highlighting when you match against  a defined synonym.  So if your content has the word “CAR” and you define a synonym of “Auto” for “CAR”.  Then when you search for Auto you will also get search results for everything that has CAR.   Works great, except that the Search results displayed don’t hit highlight CAR.    Definitely a shortcoming and was reported to Microsoft as an enhancement.  Will need to keep an eye on this to see where it goes. 

When I get my development FAST environment running, I will reproduce and add some screen shots.

Welcome

I guess it is customary to do an introductory posting to my blog. So let me tell you what you can expect.

After 36 years of writing software it's time to start writing and sharing about what I do. I'm sure it will take awhile for me to find my writing style, but that is part of the fun of this process. 36 years....wow. From typing on a teletype in the back of 8th grade math to creating custom SharePoint portal applications, and a whole lot of technology in between. There is a lot to discuss. So you can expect a mixture of flashbacks to some arcane technology as well as posting about the cool new things I'm learning now.

I've had a great career in computers. About the only thing in common with all the positions I've held has been the keyboard I type on. And even that has changed a lot (using the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard now). But I have been fortunate to be able to have a job where they pay me to play with the toys I would be playing with anyway. The technology keeps changing, the challenges get harder, but it is still fun to play in this virtual world where we can envision something and make it happen.

So...welcome aboard.