Having had a request to enable wildcard search we spent sometime looking for products that would help with it.
Anyone who’s done this will know there is a very good provider who are offering a free solution.
The issue we have had is that after implementing the solution we were no longer receiving search usage data.
Having spent several days looking for the cause I discovered that if you deploy the Out of the Box Sharepoint Search Text Box web part to the results page, you got the data, if you used the results one you didn’t.
The upshot of this was that, as the provider had used a custom Search box, the Sharepoint data in our instance never got recorded unless we deployed the standard search box to the results page.
Having done some further research I discovered that all MOSS Search web parts utilise a Sealed object Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.SearchResultHiddenObject
This object is responsible for handling best bets, relevance, results and running the query itself. It is within here I believe the usage data is updated. Despite crawling through the API libraries I can find no methods to update the Search Usage. It would also appear that the information isn’t picked up from the log files so again I assume the updating is all handled via this object.
If this is the case it will not be possible to run bespoke queries and get the usage data to report on the terms/results.
Anyone agree/disagree with this, I have posted all over the place but not received any response
Here are some links to other information round searching.
