What is New in SharePoint 2013 Search

Site collection administrators and site owners can use display templates to customize the appearance of search results by using an HTML editor, and they can customize the behavior of search results by using JavaScript. They can specify display templates that determine how result types appear.

A search result, suggestion, or recommendation is more relevant when it better satisfies the intent of the person who issues the query. SharePoint Server 2013 improves relevance in areas such as cleanness of search results, phonology, and document parsing. We can discuss each one in detail.

New ranking models

SharePoint Server 2013 provides new ranking models for people search, intranet sites, and Internet sites. A ranking model determines and rank.

Content Analysis and user interaction

The search system determines the relevance of search results in part by how content is connected, how often an item appears in search results, and which search results people click. The new analytics component in SharePoint Server 2013 tracks and analyzes this information and uses it to continuously improve relevance.

Based on analytics information, site collection administrators and site owners can customize the user experience by adding Web Parts to display recommendations and popular items.

Query rules

Without any custom code, Search service administrators, site collection administrators, and site owners can help searches respond to the intent of users by creating query rules. In a query rule, you specify conditions and correlated actions. When a query meets the conditions in a query rule, the search system performs the specified actions to improve the relevance of the search results.

Result sources

In SharePoint Server 2010, scopes and federated locations provided ways to limit searches to a certain set of content or subset of search results. In SharePoint Server 2013, result sources replace scopes and federated locations. You create and use a result source to specify a location from which to get search results and to specify a protocol for getting those results.

Crawling Improvements

SharePoint Server 2013 includes many changes and improvements related to crawling content.

Continuous crawl

In SharePoint Server 2013, you can configure crawl schedules for SharePoint content sources so that crawls are performed continuously. Setting this option eliminates the need to schedule incremental crawls and automatically starts crawls as necessary to keep the search index fresh.

Host distribution rules removed

SharePoint Server 2013 does not use host distribution rules. Instead, Search service application administrators can determine whether the crawl database should be rebalanced by monitoring the Databases view in the crawl log.

Removing items from the search index

In SharePoint Server 2010, Search service application administrators could remove items from the search index by using Search Result Removal. In SharePoint Server 2013, you can remove items from the search index only by using the crawl logs.

Discovering Contents from unstructured content

We can configure the crawler to look for entities in unstructured content, such as in the body text or the title of a document. These entities can be words or phrases, such as product names. To specify which entities to look for in the content, you can create and deploy your own dictionaries. For companies, you can use the pre-populated company extraction dictionary that SharePoint Server 2013 provides.

Improved search schema

By defining crawled properties, managed properties, and the mappings among them, the search schema determines how the properties of crawled content are saved to the search index. Crawled properties and how these are mapped to managed properties define how to transform crawled content into managed properties. The search index stores the contents of the managed properties. The attributes of the managed properties determine the search index structure. SharePoint Server 2013 introduces new attributes that you can apply to managed properties, such as sortable and refinable. The sortable attribute reduces the time that is required to return large search result sets by sorting results before they are returned. The refinable attribute enables you to create a refiner based on a particular managed property.

Search health reports

SharePoint Server 2013 provides many query health reports and crawl health reports.

For a better search experience please consider the following points while you design the farm:



Small Search farm with dedicated Search

The following farm architecture diagram illustrates only the search components and can serve as a dedicated search farm for one or more SharePoint farms. Dedicated search farms do not include Web servers.



For more details please read the following MSDN article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219669(v=office.15)