11.8 SPPS Indexing and Searching Technologies

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SharePoint Portal Server has a set of fairly advanced search and retrieval technologies. SharePoint Portal Server uses protocol handlers and a gatherer to crawl and provide search over data from a variety of different content sources.

SharePoint Portal Server can crawl documents stored on:

• File systems

• Web sites

• Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 5.5 computers

• Lotus Notes servers

• Other SharePoint Portal Server workspaces

SharePoint Portal Server is not designed to provide access to conventional relational databases, but it is possible to crawl database information if you can access the database using HTTP and build an ASP page to render the data. Document locations that are not covered by SharePoint Portal Server natively may be accessed by writing specific protocol handlers for those location types using the SharePoint Portal Server software development kit (SDK).

SharePoint Portal Server indexing uses language-specific word breakers and stemmers to extract words from the content. These 'noise' words (e.g., a, the, of ) are filtered out, and the content index is generated. Specific- language support is provided for English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Thai, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese. A 'neutral' word breaker is used for all other languages.

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