1.8. SharePoint Search

The Search feature is new to Windows SharePoint Services. In the old days, you could enable Search in SharePoint (WSS 2 and lower) only if you were using a full-blown SQL server. This was because SharePoint was simply using SQL's built-in full-text search and indexing features to do searches, which could add a significant performance load to the SQL server. This meant that if you did the Typical install of SharePoint, which is now called Basic, and used WMSDE for the database, the Search field simply would not be available in SharePoint (see Figure 1.2). WMSDE does not have the search capabilities of SQL server.

Figure 1.2. In WSS 2.0, a Typical install could not search