In an interesting twist on its Sharepoint strategy, Microsoft has released its Faceted Search webparts (add-ons) under an open-source license. As Microsoft notes, Faceted Search is a "set of web parts that provide intuitive way to refine search results by category (facet)." Faceted Search is designed to overcome the limitations that traditional content categorization and search mechanisms (full-text search or category-by-category browsing) have provided.

A good solution to these problems involves exposing the facets in dynamic taxonomies so that the user can see all of the refinement options at any time. The user can easily switch between a search based approach vs. metadata browsing, using a familiar terminology while recognizing the organization and vocabulary of the data.

It's not clear how anyone could use this open-source code beyond Sharepoint, thereby limiting its utility, but I still think it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft.

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Microsoft, SharePoint, Faceted Search, Open-Source, Open Source