Freigeben über

Tips to get the result from SharePoint search as expected

  • Artikel

SharePoint 2013

  • New and consolidated search engine
  • Fast feature inbuilt

Few common scenarios how can I get my required search result ?

  • Result page showing so many result
  • Your result is not shown, but you know the data is there
  • Why to use SharePoint search ?

There are few tips or steps which one need to take in order to get the result one is after.

Improve search engine relevancy

  • Name things well : The name of your file matters So does the URL, Which means document library names and folder names.

            For example:https://marketing/boston/Q2_2013_sales.docx is much better than https://mktg/bosq213sls.docx

  • Use underscores between whole words
  • Use metadata [making sure people have metadata]
  • Understand how the ‘Title’ property is used
  • Get your user profiles in order : Take the time to define properties that will be used, along with governance and usage policies  Things like:
    • About me
    • Title
    • Expertise
    • Interests
    • Projects

Enhance with stuff outside the engine

  • Define query rules
  • Define promoted results
  • Provide a definition for keywords and acronyms

Manually define the top 20-30 items that users will search on things like:

  • Product Names
  • Industry Terms
  • Office Locations
  • Acronyms
  • Common Terms (“company handbook”, “lunch menu”)
  • Provide synonyms (“lunch”, “menu”, “cafeteria”, etc.)

Use Definitions : Definitions are a great way to:

  • Clarify what an acronym means
  • Clarify what an industry term means
  • Provide actual data in the search result itself

Clean up your titles

The Title property is important and it’s often wrong SharePoint will use title property for searching and weights it heavily. But wait…there’s more! Since Title is often either wrong or blank, SharePoint sometimes attempts to ‘fix’ this :

Actually a *feature* of SharePoint 2007/2010/2013!

“Optimistic Title Override” in SharePoint 2007/2010

“Schema Sensitive Metadata Extractor” in SharePoint 2013 This feature takes the first sentence of the document instead of the actual title property

    • Don’t like it? Turn it off in SharePoint 2007/2010 (but not 2013):
    • In registry, navigate to the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager]
    • Change the hexadecimal value for EnableOptimisticTitleOverride to 0 (zero) on the right hand side. [Also one for EnableLastModifiedOverride]
    • Restart SharePoint Search service by typing the following commands in command prompt.

net stop osearch14

net start osearch14

    • Perform a full crawl

Review search reports and end-user feedback

  • Review the search reports on a regular basis
  • Put a survey link on the search results page

Based on feedback, REVISE things

Improve the overall experience

  • Configure search refiners
  • Configure result sets
  • Train users!

Map a Crawl property to a refinable managed property

Enable a term set for faceted navigation (https://blogs.msdn.com/b/faceted_navigation_in_sharepoint_2013/archive/2012/11/23/configure-faceted-navigation-for-a-product-catalog-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx)

Managed property name

Data type for mapping.

RefinableDate00 - RefinableDate19

Values contain dates.

RefinableDecimal00 - RefinableDecimal09

Values contain numbers with maximum three decimals.

RefinableDouble00 - RefinableDouble09

Values contain numbers with more than three decimals.

RefinableInt00 - RefinableInt49

Values are whole numbers.

RefinableString00 - RefinableString99

Values are strings. This includes values that use the data type Text, Person or Group, Managed Metadata, Choice and Yes/No

Understand the 4 out of the box configured result sources:

Add more as needed…examples:

  • Images
  • PDFs
  • File Shares

Train Users

  • Prefix & Postfix (wildcard *)
  • Inclusions & Exclusions (NOT)
  • AND & OR
  • Double quotes for multi-word phrases
  • [Property Name]:[Value]
    • Author:Gagan
    • ContentType:document
    • Title:”Plans”

 

Terms used in SharePoint Search

Indexing (also known as crawling) is when the search engine processes content and catalogs the key attributes and contents of files

Querying is the action of looking at the index to see if there are any items that meet the search criteria specified by the user Search results are what the search engine returns after a query is passed to it

Federation is the action when one search engine passes a query on to another search engine to provide search results without having to index the same content source

Example: Wikipedia, Amazon, and Bing can provide results this way

Search Refiners enable a user to visually filter search results

  • Typically shown on the left side of the search results page
  • SharePoint automatically displays refiners for some common metadata attributes such as the type of result (e.g., Word document, PowerPoint presentation), the name of the author of the item, and when the item was last modified.
  • Users can click on a refiner to display search results for only specific criteria, such as only PowerPoint presentations that have been modified within the past week.
  • You can add your own refiners

Query Rules, which were formerly configured as keywords, allow you to define conditions (like what word someone is searching on) and specify corresponding actions

Promoted results, which were formerly known as best bets, allow you to specify that certain items should always be shown at the top of the search results for specific keywords entered by the user.

For example, if a user searches for the word sales, you can have the sales team site show up at the top of the list of search results.

Crawled properties are metadata that is extracted from items during content indexing. Metadata can be structured content (such as the name of the author of a Word document) or unstructured content (such as the language in which the content is written).

Managed properties have metadata that is either automatically created by SharePoint or created by a search administrator. Crawled properties are mapped to manage properties so that they can be used as search refiners and can be used to sort search results.

Entity extraction is the process of SharePoint search parsing content during the crawl process and dynamically building search refiners. One example of this is the built-in “Company name extraction” process where SharePoint can create a refiner based on a list of company names.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2013
    Quite a informative blog