Friday, June 24, 2011

FAST Phonetic Searching for Names is Not Working or Return No Result

According to Microsoft documentation, Phonetic Search is one of the main functionalities in Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. Users can search for a person in the organization by name without knowing the exact spelling of the name. For example, the search query "John Steal" could yield "John Steele" in the search results. However, there is a weird/funny/unexplainable scenario here. When I was using Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to do phonetic searching, there is always no results returned. When I changed to Mozilla Firefox, IE7 or Chrome, it just works! This is a very special case where a functionality of a Microsoft Product does not work on Internet Explorer. I could not find any solutions to this. So if you want the Phonetic Search to work, just use another browser.

Take a look at the illustration below:

When the search is being done in Firefox:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is most likely because you have different language settings in your browsers.

Zhaph said...

It mostly comes down to what locale each browser is sending by default.

For more details see here:
http://www.kowalski.ms/2010/07/09/sharepoint-server-2010-phonetic-and-nickname-search/

A lot of locales don't have nicknames or the like set up for them.