Learning Search-driven Application Development with SharePoint 2013: The search engine in SharePoint 2013 is a refreshed version and this book will show you how to make the most of it with a range of methodologies for developing search-driven applications. JavaScript experience required.

The best way to explain what a result source is, is by using a real life example.

Say you need to buy some milk. You know that you need to go to the supermarket and look for milk in the dairy department. You aren't going to be looking for milk in the tools department or even other areas of the store (such as the fruits and vegetables departments); you limit yourself to just the dairy department.

A result source acts the same. It allows you to restrict search queries to a specific subset of content from the search index by defining a set of rules that must be met by the content in order to show up as a result.

If the result source sounds familiar to you, it is because you have already encountered it before. Take a look at the following screenshot taken from the default SharePoint 2013 search center:

Below the search box we have four search verticals. These verticals are actually using result sources. Think about the Videos vertical. It takes your search...

Query rules are a hot new feature of SharePoint 2013 search. In essence, query rules are the infrastructure for query pipeline extensibility. Using query rules, we can create conditional rules that will intelligently respond to what the user is trying to search for.

Let's assume we have a knowledge center site that tags all of its assets (videos, images, documents, and so on) using the following taxonomy dictionary as shown in the following screenshot:

If a user searches for one of these terms, we should display a result on top of the other results, pointing the user to the knowledge center. A result that will always appear on top of other results is called a promoted result.

Promoted results are very similar to SharePoint 2010's best bets, but with one key difference: promoted results can react to taxonomy terms as well as matched keywords.

A promoted result, for the knowledge center we mentioned previously, will look as shown in the following screenshot:

Now, let's assume...

When working with out of the box SharePoint search web parts, SharePoint 2013 simplifies the process by cutting down the number of web parts from 17 in SharePoint 2010 to just four.

In addition to the core search web parts, there are a number of new web parts that are powered by search. The most important of the bunch, without a doubt, is the content search web part.

The content search web part is the evolution of the content query web part from SharePoint 2007/2010. It allows us to display content straight from the search index, based on a query. For example, we can use the content search web part to display the latest document added on a specific site collection (that is, the knowledge center) to any other site collection in our farm using a simple query!

The content search web part infrastructure relies on two factors:

We will discuss display the template in detail in Chapter 4,...

With all the theory we just discussed, it's time to put the wheels in motion. With the knowledge we gained so far in this chapter, we can build a simple search-driven application that will use query rules to react to users' intentions.

First, let's get our infrastructure in order and create two new sites as follows:

This chapter mixed theory with practice. We started off by discussing result sources, the heart of search-driven applications. We saw examples on what result sources are, what they are used for, and got introduced to search verticals.

Query rules, the main concept of the chapter, was introduced next. Query rules are a new addition to SharePoint, and they allow us to respond intelligently to user queries. When building a query rule, you have to remember three questions: where is the user going to use this query rule (which search vertical)?, what makes this query rule fire?, and what does the query rule do once fired?

Once we understood the concept of query rules, we moved on and got introduced to the new king of search-related web parts: the content search web part.

The chapter ended with a step-by-step tutorial on creating a small and simple search-driven application based on the subjects discussed in this chapter.

While this search-driven application may seem simple, remember that...