How to make SharePoint searchable 

Are your employees delighted by their SharePoint search experience? We hear of a lot that aren’t. This most likely is the result of inflated expectation, user error, or deficiencies with SharePoint. We look at the issues poor search causes, how SharePoint search works and what can be done to optimise it.  

In ‘The Effortless Experience’, the authors explain how customers judge service quality against their best experiences of service. Regardless of its sector or industry, employees now expect the same quality of service from their employer as they receive from their bank, energy providers, and hotels.  

Just as people don’t contextualise their expectations of service, they don’t make allowances for different ‘search’ platforms or experiences. They compare SharePoint search to their best experience elsewhere – be it Google, or their favourite social media platform. Many employees aren’t delighted by their SharePoint search experience, but it doesn’t need to be like this.    

What’s the problem?

SharePoint search is regularly failing to provide people with what they need, and we hear about this a lot. Searches return apparent duplicates (producing ‘which one should I use?’ dilemmas), or worse a mass of irrelevant results. Anecdotally, a lot of time is being wasted on fruitless searches.  

In larger organisations, ‘people search’ can be particularly challenging. Though an employee knows what they need help with, or the skill or role of their likely helper, they are spending lots of time trying to find them.  

There are big benefits in saving time, improving knowledge sharing, making information easier to find, and preventing sprawl by eliminating duplicate documents and files. But how can we fix this? We’ll start by understanding how SharePoint search works.  

How SharePoint search works

There are actually two, rather than one, types of SharePoint search and these are ‘Classic’ and ‘Modern’.  

Classic is the search you’ll find in the Search Centre, on publishing sites, and classic team sites. This can be customised to your business’ needs.  

Modern search uses ‘Microsoft Search’, and this is the search in the header bar at the top of SharePoint. It’s also the search for SharePoint hub sites, communication sites, and modern team sites. Microsoft Search is personalised, showing results relevant to the individual. So, what one employee sees is different to others, even with the same search term.  

We’ll come to training later, but it’s important that people understand these differences to avoid loss of confidence.  

Classic and Modern are both enabled by default, and Admins can’t enable or disable either search experience. Both use the same search index to find search results, and, in simple terms, it works like this. The search function crawls lists and libraries for content and adds the site columns and values to the search index. These are mapped to managed properties in the search index. When a query is entered into a search box, it is sent to the search index. Here the search engine finds matching results, and then sends them to a search results page. 

Clearly, the completeness of the search index is critical to the effectiveness of search – and there are many individual SharePoint settings that can affect this, starting with the crawler.  

Improving SharePoint search

You can optimise search by enabling and configuring a series of key features that will ensure that the search engine indexes your content properly.  

1. Indexing

Make sure that all lists, libraries, and pages are configured to allow content crawling. You can do this by looking at the crawl settings under ‘Advanced Settings’. For example, ‘Allow items from this document library to appear in search results’ needs to be set to ‘Yes’ for crawling to occur.  Search indexing respects SharePoint’s security settings, so it’s also important that permissions allow appropriate users to access the content.  

2. Customise

Modify the search schema to ensure that important metadata is correctly indexed, by mapping crawled properties to the searchable fields of the managed properties. You can improve indexing efficiency, by eliminating unnecessary properties as well as marking key managed properties as searchable, queryable, refinable, and sortable.  

3. Metadata

Use managed metadata columns or site columns to provide the search engine with structured data that it can recognise. As part of this it’s important to have a consistent taxonomy (ie naming convention) for managed metadata fields across documents and libraries. Staff have an important role to play here, adding relevant tags and metadata to content as its created or uploaded. But they’ll only do so if they understand why.  

4. Admin Centre

Check that search is correctly enabled in the SharePoint Admin Centre’s ‘Search’ section. Under ‘Content Sources’ make sure that all the required sites, libraries, and lists are included. If required, you can add new content sources for custom locations. Set up regular incremental crawls for updated content and periodic full crawls to capture new or reconfigured properties. Consider configuring ‘Promoted Results’ for frequently searched terms. This will ensure that popular content is always visible at the top.  

5. Verify

Run a full crawl to ensure that all content is indexed and check crawl logs for errors, inaccessible content, and missing permissions. Test search using a variety of keywords and phrases. Admins can access a ‘Search Query Tool’ and use this to troubleshoot and validate what is indexed and how queries are performing. There is also a useful ‘Search Analytics’ feature, in the Admin Centre, which shows search trends and may reveal required configuration refinements.   

6. Troubleshoot

Common search issues include missing content and poor performance. If content is missing check permissions, crawl settings, and that the item is checked in. For performance issues, you can optimise the index by reviewing unused or overly complex metadata properties. SharePoint’s ‘Search Diagnostics Tool’ can assist with further troubleshooting. 

7. Educate

Important though all this is, technical improvements alone aren’t enough. Employee education is vital. A business-wide education campaign should explain classic and modern search, why two people can get differing search results, and the importance of metadata. Teach staff how to use advanced search queries, wildcards, and filters effectively and support this with training for content/site owners to help maintain best practices.

Take search further: ‘People search’ in SharePoint

You can take search further with PnP Modern Search and people search is a great example of this. We mentioned earlier that people search can be a challenging, especially in larger organisations, and out-of-the-box SharePoint search doesn’t resolve this.  

PnP Modern Search is a set of open-source search web parts created and maintained by the SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) community. These provide enhanced, highly customisable search experiences that work with both classic SharePoint and Modern/Microsoft search. Allowing the creation of people and/or skills directories that will enable employees to easily find the individuals, capabilities and skills they need.

Next steps

There’s a limit to what we can cover in a single blog, but you can now see that your SharePoint environment can become fully searchable. The benefits are significant, saving employee’s’ time, improving knowledge sharing, making information easier to find, and boosting productivity.