Queries and Results in SharePoint Search Server

The appeal of having a query engine on your SharePoint server is not limited to those with programming experience as the functionality is supplemented with point-and-click capabilities for administrators on the site collection level and the site level, relieving the obligation of farm-level privileges and allowing you to control your own site.

Transitioning from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013, query processing can be thought of as the growth of search scopes, federated locations, and best bets. As search indexes expand, the set of "relevant" information which may show up in search results will grow. To compensate for this, users are now required to improve search queries to find specific information. Some of the important concepts to leverage can be:

• Where the query originated from to find information specific for the site in general.
• Who launched the query in regard to parameters governing the individual.
• What concepts or entities can be recognized in the query. 

As the search process initiates, we can compare this with the search engines which we are pretty familiar with. If you were to perform a search on your computer, most likely a search for the current weather conditions would return information specific to your area. A search for the local McDonald's would return the locations of the McDonald's in the area on a map. Understanding the concepts, location, and entities allow search engines to produce results which correlate to the users information. This can be referred to as Search Optimization to understand the user. 

In SharePoint 2013, the use of search scopes, federated locations, and best bets have been deprecated in favor of result sources, query rules, and result blocks. This alteration shouldn't make a significant difference in creating an efficient search service. 

Result sources focuses your search and refines the total information which is being returned to the subset of information which has been applied to your search. The resources in 2013 include a resource builder to apply these conditions based on the user, search page URL, site, or even the date in which you are searching. This enables you to collect information from remote content. 

Query rules consist of the custom logic which you apply to your query. This allows you to program your search service to recognize certain requests and return information which may be specific to the task at hand, including document types so that the file content matches the operation which you are performing. 

A Result Type displays information gathered by design which may also communicate with result blocks, allowing you to collect two or three of the most relevant documents or items for the query. The SearchExecutor class, which is a new appearance in SharePoint 2013, allows you to execute multiple, related queries simultaneously.

The results are composed of three parts: The Rules Engine, Property List, and the Rendering Template.