Sharepoint 2010 Search --- Whats New in sharepoint Search?

The major Enhancements in Search of sharepoint 2010 are :

• Platform – improvements to increase customization, to allow developers to extend the platform and build new applications.
• Management & reliability – including admin webparts, scriptable admin (Windows PowerShell) and improved monitoring including SCOM support.
• Federation – via OpenSearch with client side software including IE8, Firefox and Windows 7 plus federated providers including Bing, SharePoint 2010 and any searchable RSS feeds and SQL result sets.
• User Experience – improved user interfaces, including 'visual' navigation, see the screen shot below:

• Scalability – both content scalability (size of the corpus) and query performance scalability via multiple crawlers, and the ability to both partition and mirror the index.
• Social and people search – a big element of the improvements in SP2010, allowing search to surface the tacit knowledge stored inside your people by allowing those people themselves to be found. This is heavily tied into the social side of SharePoint such as My Sites and profiles.
• Relevance – improved algorithms for better matching and ranking capabilities and improved language support.