What's new in ArcGIS for Desktop Search?
Support for Spatial Search
You can now search for your data spatially. Conceptually, a spatial search is simply adding geographic constraints to your search query. When you enable spatial search, the search results are tied to the current visible extents of your map. As you zoom/pan your map, the search results get updated to show the relevant data within (or overlapping) your current visible extents. The behavior is similar to searching for restaurants or other landmarks in Google maps. As you zoom/pan your Google map, it automatically refreshes results in the current visible extents. Search also supports text-based spatial search, meaning you can search for relevant data using geographic names. For example, you can type in a query like Data in Paris, France, and ArcGIS figures out the spatial extents of Paris, France, and returns results that match the extents of Paris, France.
Sorting and Grouping of search results
You can now sort your search results using a variety of choices. By default, search results are sorted by relevance. You can change the sorting order any time to meet your specific needs. In addition to sorting, you can group search results by data type. For example, you can quickly examine the breakdown of your search results by data type and pick a subset of the data types that are of interest to you to narrow down your search results.
Synonyms support
Synonyms are a group of words that have roughly the same meaning in a given context. When you search for a word, you get results that match the exact word. Synonyms support extends the search to contain words with the same or similar meaning. For example, if you search for roads, you may want to find hits not only for the word roads but also relevant results that contain words like routes or streets. The built-in synonyms support is a generic synonyms list and not specific to GIS terms. You can customize synonyms to meet your organization's specific needs using user-defined synonym support.
Other enhancements
The look and feel of the search results has been enhanced to show thumbnails. Also, a context menu has been added with several actions that you can perform on search results. Indexing options have been improved to optionally generate thumbnails while you index your data.