Whats New in Sharepoint search 2010 ?

All of us know that Search plays an integral part of any successful SharePoint deployment and is an area that Microsoft continues to invest in with each new release of SharePoint.

Microsoft went ahead and acquired FAST some years back which now offers as a separate add-on to SharePoint for those willing to invest in high end enterprise search.  In addition to FAST, SharePoint 2010 search comes in a number of flavors each offering their own feature set and capabilities.

New features and functionality for end users.

New search query capabilities

• Boolean query syntax for free-text queries and for property queries
  
  SharePoint 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.
  
• Federated search connectors for searching the enterprise from Windows 7
  
  After SharePoint Server 2010 returns results for a search query, a Windows 7 user can create a federated search connector shortcut for that search scope in Windows Explorer. This enables the user to search that scope at any time from Windows 7. The search results and associated metadata are displayed in Windows Explorer, where the user can take advantage of Windows features such as file preview and drag-and-drop. For any given search query, the search results that are displayed in Windows 7 are exactly the same as those that are displayed in the Search Core Results Web Part when the search is conducted directly in SharePoint Server 2010.

 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee667266%28office.14%29.aspx#BKMK_RESULT