Microsoft recently announced their new product - Search Server 2008. It comes in two versions, Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express. The latest is free and the only claimed difference is in support for “High Availability and Load Balancing” in the paid version. It’s all nice, if we knew limitations of the Express version, but there is not such info yet. So the difference between these versions is quite unintelligible.

Planned release date is first half of 2008, but you already can download Release Candidate of Express version from Microsoft website and play with it. And that is what I plan to do in some days.

Search server is based on SharePoint Server, and, that is, on SQL Server. You also can upgrade it to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.  (Read it as another MS effort to sell SharePoint Server and, thus, Office). Search Server can be installed only on Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008.

We did have Google Desktop and now there is server version that is similar to Google Mini. Although there are already many differences: Microsoft have free version of their product, there is no limitation on number of documents in Search Server, Microsoft’s solution does not require separate server as Google’s and, finally, Search Server it is clamed to have better administration interface with a rich administration dashboard (I like this new modern term, administration dashboard, it is more from marketing world…). Google Mini comes with support of about 220 file formats it is able to work with. I did not find info on how many formats Search Server supports, but it seems that there are not too many yet. Although there is Federated Search Connectors feature that is based on the Open Search standard. Many connectors are already implemented by Microsoft Partners and you also can implement your own.