2.1.3.5 Search Services

Search services provide the ability for a user to quickly see a list of the most relevant documents in a large document collection, based on a specified keyword query. A large document collection can have tens of millions of documents. This quick query resolution requires the creation and maintenance of the inverted index in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. SharePoint Products and Technologies implements the protocols that are necessary for creating the indexes, including those for crawling (traversing the URL space of the documents that the user wishes to search and synchronizing the changes in the URL space), retrieving the documents, parsing the documents, performing tokenization, and creating the inverted index. SharePoint Products and Technologies also implements the front-end protocols that are necessary for executing queries against these data structures and for administering the search configuration.

Both Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 and later implement search protocols. In SharePoint Foundation 2013, the protocols are limited to the subset that is necessary for crawling and providing a search capability across the content that is stored in SharePoint Foundation 2013. The SharePoint Products and Technologies search service provides search capabilities across the content in all the SharePoint Foundation 2013 sites in the enterprise as well as across other websites, file shares, and other content sources. Unless otherwise specified, the concepts, configuration, and protocols apply to search services in SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 and later.

The following is a description of the architecture and components of the subsystems in the search functionality in the SharePoint Products and Technologies search services, along with the protocols involved in interoperability between the components.