Hit Highlighting - Inconsistent

Question

I Have SharePoint Server Standard 2010 and am using the core results web part on a number of pages to display results. The hithighlightingsummary property works sometimes and not others. The search results themselves are correct, the term searched for always appears in the document.  The data being searched are sometimes large files and I wondered if this had anything to do with it. 

I have not been able to find any consistent reason for why sometimes the hit highlighting works and other times it doesn't

I found what appears to be a similar thread on the forums here but unfortunately no explanation of the behaviour.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointsearch/thread/4709904e-4180-46ad-81e7-5bf844304621/

Any help gratefully received

Jo

Answer 1

Hello Jo,

My research indicates that SharePoint stores the first 1000 words of the document as the summary for the document.  If the search term is contained within this summary, then the term will be returned, highlighted.

If the search term is located after the first 1000 words, the summary content will be displayed, but not the search term.  This behavior has been determined to be by design, due to the negative impact that a larger summary size would have on the property store database size.

I hope this information helps.

Thanks!

Bob

Answer 2

Thanks for the response. It is helpful information but it isn't a helpful behaviour. I suspected that some kind of limitation was in place but one of the reasons for choosing SharePoint as a product is we have a lot of content to manage and need to be able to search it effectively. The fact that this limitation is not detailed anywhere obvious is really not good enough.  The product is sold as having hit highlighting but the limitation is not mentioned. Because there was no response to this post within 48 hours I opened a support call with Microsoft and even the support technician I am dealing with has not explained this so it can't be well known.

So I suppose the next question is, provided I am willing to take the performance hit is there any workaround for this.

Thanks

Jo

Answer 3

Hello Jo,

I have come across the same problem and would like to know if you were able to work around this problem.

Do let me know.

Regards,
Sudhish