I was building a search indexer and handler against our enterprise knowledge repository content system a year back. Our knowledge repository has different types of content i.e. structured content like HTML, XML and unstructured content like PDF, MS-WORD, and other office documents. This is when I have learnt the usefulness of search engines like Google and FAST (FAST is now Microsoft owned). Both Google and FAST have gained a lot of popularity in the last few years. Google (the best in the web search) provides a sharepoint plug-in. FAST has the sharepoint web parts for searching. The advantages of using specially FAST over MOSS search are:
Scalability: Scalablitily is defined in two ways. One way is system scalability and availability i.e. MOSS has only one index server with a single point of failure where as FAST introduces the distributive model (cluster) for indexing. Second way is: Query Scalability i.e. howmany queries per second (QPS) can be handled by a search server? MOSS search server does not define this particular parameter where as FAST claims that it is 1000's QPS.
Navigation: MOSS only supports a shallow faceted search solution by the best bets on the metadata. FAST supports a deep faceted search solution model and therefore provides a slice and dice of the search results through the deep navigation.
Federation: MOSS supports federation with out mixing the results from various data sources and navigation components.Therefore, it displays the results seperately. FAST supports a true (advanced) federation including sending the search queries to different web search APIs and mixing the results. For ex: if you have a site like hotwire or priceline for users to book air line tickets, you have to search different carriers (like Delta ,AA, US Airways, etc..) but also you can provide search results from your partner search sites like orbit, hotwire, and priceline in a unified way.
Relevancy and Ranking (Weights): I have found it very difficult to fine tune the relevancy on search results in MOSS 2007. FAST has a management GUI to setup the rules.
Advanced Indexing and Document Processing: MOSS does not have the capability to index unstructred content like PDF, MS-WORD, or other office documents where as FAST will let you index the unstructred content.
To be completed: Why Google over MOSS?
http://www.google.com/enterprise/whygoogle.html
Other useful resource to learn more about sharepoint search community tool kit,
http://sct.codeplex.com/
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