Expertise Search
SharePoint has one final and extremely
interesting feature in SharePoint 2010 People Search. Users now have
the ability to execute an expertise search for themselves with a
special set of content. Expertise search, which is more commonly
refered to as “vanity search,” is similar to “googling yourself.” In a
strong effort to build out the social networking features in SharePoint
2010, when a user searches for his or her own profile, a few unique
features are returned in addition to the standard People result
content. These features can be seen in Figure 8.
Figure 8. Vanity search result
When viewing your own People search result, you
can find your About Me and Ask Me About “blurbs” to the right of the
result. The “About Me” section is where you can provide a personal
description of yourself. The “Ask Me About” section tells people about
your interests, skills, responsibilities, and business specialties.
Both of these sections are essentially an elevator pitch of yourself to
all other SharePoint users. Keeping this information up to date is
essential for organizations that rely on SharePoint to connect people
with each other. If your profile is out of date, then other users may
contact you about projects you are no longer involed with or may not be
able to find you for the project you are currently working on. The
content for both these sections can be edited on your MySite profile.
When returning your own People search profile
as a result, you will also be presented with a uniqe box below the
result. This box, conveniently titled “Help people find me”, contains a
few helpful tools and information to aid other SharePoint users in
connecting to your profile. On the left side of this box is a link
titled “Update My Profile”, which lands on your My Profile edit page.
Below this link are the statistics on the number of times other
SharePoint users executed searches that returned your profile as a
result. Statistics are presented for searches over the last month and
the last week by default.
The right column of the “Help people find me”
box is headed by another link to your My Profile edit page titled
“Update My Keywords”. Just like document searching, keywords are
structured properties that SharePoint uses to connect search queries to
relevant results. Consequently, creating accurate keywords for your
user profile will help other users return your profile in their search
results when appropriate. Keeping your keywords up-to-date is an easy
way to improve your profile's relevancy. To aid in this keyword
creation, an overview of the keywords that other users have entered
that led to your profile are presented below the “Update My Keywords”
link.
The Preferences Page
The final link that can be selected next to the
query field on both the All Sites and People search pages is the
Preferences page. This page allows users to set user profile-specific
settings for searching such as whether search suggestions appear and
the languages that are used. The user-selected settings made on this
site are applied to a user's entire SharePoint search experience,
disregarding which computer the user uses to access SharePoint.
Settings are tied to a user profile and not an IP address and are the
same across all web applications. The Preferences page is accessed by
clicking the Preferences link to the right of the search field (Figure 9).
Figure 9. Preferences page link location
After clicking the Preferences link, the user is navigated to the Preferences page, shown in Figure 10.
The Search Suggestions setting enables or disables search suggestions
from the search box for the current user. This is especially useful if
the user accesses the search box via the Internet on a connection with
high latency. This would in some cases cause significant delay when
showing search suggestions or otherwise disturb the user experience of
the page—the reason being the round-trip between client and server is
taking too long when entering text into the search box.
The Language setting in the Preferences page is
used to define the stemmers and word breakers used for searching. Since
different languages include different stemmers and word breakers,
specifying the set that SharePoint utilizes, if more than one is
available, can help to provide increased relevance to users searching
on international installations.
Note
Manually selecting languages helps overcome the problem in MOSS 2007,
where the current browser language setting would dictate which stemmer
and word breaker were used. Modifying the preferences overrides the
browser language setting, thus providing a solution to this problem.
Figure 10. Preferences page
The user can turn search suggestions
on and off for the logged-in user profile by checking and unchecking
the check box. This setting is ignored if Search Suggestions are turned
off on the Search Box Web Part. To specify specific languages to be
applied to the search query, the user can select the radio button next
to “Search using the following languages”. The user can select up to
five languages to use during search for the logged-in user profile by
checking and unchecking the corresponding check boxes.
