Overview of Search Components in SharePoint Server

Structuring the search architecture essentially depends on the fact where the user intends to use search i.e. the enterprise or  Internet sites. The search architecture consists of  search components and databases. While building the search architecture, there are different factors to be considered including fault tolerance, volume of your content, high availability, estimated amount of page views and queries per second, etc. 

Without further ado, let's explore the search components in SharePoint Server

Crawl component

The crawl component is designed to crawl different content sources like SharePoint Server content,  line of business applications,  file shares, etc. It is by invoking the appropriate indexing connector or protocol handler that the crawl component connects to the content sources to retrieve information.Once the content is retrieved, the crawled content items are transferred to the content processing component by the crawl component.

Analytics Processing Component

Two types of analyses are performed by analytics processing component:

• Search Analytics 
•  Usage Analytics

The component utilizes information gathered from these analyses to improve create search reports, search relevance, and generate recommendations and deep links.

Search analytics is all about extracting information like anchor text, links, data related to people,metadata, the number of times an item is clicked from the link database.Usage analytics generates statistics reports and usage. It analyzes usage log information received from the front-end through the event store. In addition, usage analytics results are stored in the analytics reporting database.

The search results are added to the items in the search index.

Content Processing Component

Different operations like document parsing and property mapping are performed by content processing components. These components process crawled items and send the items to the index component. Further, linguistics processing including language detection and entity extraction are also performed by the content processing components. The crawled items are added in the search index.

Index component

The entire  search index  can be  divided into discrete portions called index partitions.Each and every  index partition holds one or more index replicas containing the same information. The logical representation of an index replica is an index component.The content processing component sends processed items to the index component which are then written to an index file. In addition, the index component also receives queries from the query processing component and returns result sets.

Query processing component

Linguistics processing such as word breaking and stemming are performed by  query component. It analyzes and processes queries and results. Once a query is received from the  search front-end, the query processing component analyzes and processes it to optimize precision, recall and relevance. Thereafter, the processed query is submitted to the index component. The index component returns a result set based on the processed query to the query processing component, which processes that result set, before sending it back to search front-end.

Search administration component

Search administration component performs provisioning. It is the process of adding and initializing instances of the other search components.The component also runs the system processes for search. 

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