Last week, Microsoft unveiled the latest addition to their line of enterprise search solutions, Microsoft Search Server 2008 (MSS). MSS 2008 is available in two flavors, a commerical, standard edition and a free, “express” edition. The primary difference between the two versions being that MSS Express can only be deployed on a single server, whereas the commercial version can be deployed on a server farm and therefore is able to all the benefits that come with farm deployment, such as load balancing. You can view a comparison of the feature-sets offered in the two versions of MSS with Microsoft’s enterprise search heavyweight, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), here.

In MSS, Microsoft adds federated search capabilities to the base search functionalities found in MOSS 2007. Federated search allows MSS to query sources which it cannot index, such as web services and search engines, provided that the source supports the OpenSearch protocol. Federated search leverages the existing search and sort mechanisms found in these sources. Federated search connectors are needed for MSS to properly query the federated source and translate the results into a usable format. A connector specifies a template URL for querying the service and an XSL document for translating the search results into HTML that can be displayed in the Federated Results Web Part. Microsoft has made several connectors for popular services available here.

For this experiment, we put together a federated search connector for querying Flickr via the Flickr API. We wanted our connector to present our search results in a compelling manner, so we decided to add some interaction via JavaScript in our XSL. This permits us to visualize each photo in the result set on a Virtual Earth map, giving the photo a geographical context.

IDV Enterprise Search Demo

Click here to view our demo.

The release candidate of Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express can be downloaded here. You can download our federated search connector for the Flickr API here. Go here for more information on building federated search connectors.

Note: You must make sure that the “Retrieve Results Asynchronously” option in the Federated Results Web Part is unchecked if you intend to use our Flickr connector.

The release of MSS 2008 is expected in the first half of 2008.