Returning Best Bets and Visual Best Bets with KeywordQuery and FAST Search for SharePoint

When using the Search Center the Best Bets or Visual Best Bets functionality works like a charm, but I have not been able to get it to work using the KeywordQuery class in SharePoint.

I had done some research previously on the matter after being contacted by Xavier Vanneste who blogged about this (http://blog.xvanneste.com/Lists/Billets/Post.aspx?ID=82), but was not able to figure it out at the time.

I’m currently writing sample code for my upcoming book on FS4SP and I had to figure this out. Time to bring out the tools!

One hour with the Visual Studio Reflector plugin and setting break-points internally in the SSA I finally figured it out. And in a way it was obvious.

How to prevent an item from being indexed with FAST for SharePoint

Yes, it can be done!

[Update 2012-05-25: There is an even better hack to solve this issue as Kai wrote in a commen below this post. Check out Segei Sergeev answer in this TechNet thread.]

It’s Saturday, my kid has gone to sleep, and I finally have time to tell you guys the good news. Preventing an item from being index, or to paraphrase, to drop a document in the document processing pipeline is indeed possible!

You can already prevent items from being indexed by limiting SharePoint lists and libraries from being crawled with library settings and you can use crawl rules to exclude certain url patterns. But what I am talking about is preventing an item from being indexed based business rules in your organization and looking at the meta data of the item or inside the text of a file.

There are many scenarios for not wanting an item searchable. You might want to prevent indexing items in your organization which contains the super secret codename “wobba”, or items of a certain ContentType. When indexing file shares you don't have much meta data to go on at all for excluding items, so creating your own module with the proper rules might be the only way to go.