I have finally got around to upgrading my site from v1.1 to 2.0.

MOSS Faceted Search extension is a set of web parts that provide an intuitive, user friendly way to refine search results by predefined categories, or facets. It can be used at ecommerce, document discovery, people search, etc.

The beauty of the chosen approach is that it doesn't matter how facets are crawled into the METADATA store. Any core MOSS functionality will work the same: indexing through BDC, external web sites via HTTP protocols, or local SharePoint sites, libraries, lists. As soon as the content is indexed and META tag assigned, it is available for facets.

New release encapsulates foundation changes in the design and code, that provides perfect balance between accuracy and performance. Highlights are:

• Multi-thread processing. 1st thread runs for up to 500 facets synchronously, while the 2nd thread is running asynchronously against up to ~30,000 facets
• Client side refresh (not AJAX) that updates only Facets web part w/o page refresh
• Web part connections to pass Facet settings to the Bread Crumbs
• Extended facet schema now supports:
  • Facet icons. Default icon per Facet name complimented by an icon per Facet value
  • Friendly names for facet values
  • Exclusions. Allow exclude facet when values match pattern
  • Built-in wild-card match, especially useful for exclusions
  • Improved search syntax, added supports for sentences and quoted phrases

This release includes numerous fixes and complemented by extended documentation.

The extension is proving popular with over 9000 visits to the download site already. Get it here http://www.codeplex.com/facetedsearch