The New Local Internet

I’ve been saying for years now, why can’t my LAN be like the internet?  Why do I have to search for docs or even phrases in docs

manually on my different file servers?  What I want is to go to a location on my LAN, and type in what I want to find, and have it

go out for me to all my servers and bring back my results.  You know… like Google and Yahoo.  Why can’t it just be that simple?

Well, it actually is.  I got my first glimpse at Microsoft Search Server at the launch in L.A. last week and let me tell you, I’m in Love.

You install it on your server, point it at a SQL Server you want it to use and give it the locations of the shares and other locations

you want it to crawl. It’s basically just the search from Sharepoint that’s been ripped into its own product.  When it crawls it stores the index in the DB you specified and you’re off.  Now, you can go to the Sharepoint

page it created for you and search for anything in any doc you indexed.  WHAM!  You’ve got the internet at your office.  And what’s really cool

is they’ve got preview widgets too so you can mouseover an entry and see a preview of the doc.  Now that’s just slick.

And you can choose blogs, websites, Google searches, etc to crawl as well so you’ll get a merged list in your results.

This has been a long time coming and personally, I’m grateful and excited that this problem has finally been solved.  And now that it’s

here, it’ll only get better and the things you can do with it will only grow.

Now here’s the cool part.  It’s FREE!!! Ok, not every version is free, but you get plenty of functionality with the free version. 

Basically the only difference between the free and paid versions is the paid version allows you to do load balancing and clustering so you

can have a true enterprise search engine.  Other than that, it’s all good.  And they don’t limit the size of the DB either, which is the

most important thing of all.

So go download this thing, and then go to codeplex and find some add-ins for it.  You really won’t be sorry.  I just put it in my LAN at home

and it’s still crawling, but I expect very good things.  Oh yeah, that’s what I forgot… you can control the crawling schedules so it doesn’t

bring down your boxes when they’re busy.  Gotta love that.

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