Now that we have seen the overview, what
Search configuration options do we have?
SharePoint Search allows us to do quite a
few configuration options so let's cover
them in detail. Something that's important
to know; however, is that most Search
customization options only work for
Classic Search pages at the time of
recording this course in September 2019.
Microsoft does plan to bring those
customization options into Modern, but
they are not there yet, again at the time
of recording this course. Something
important to understand as we talk about
Search is the Search Schema. The Search
Schema is a mechanism in SharePoint Search
that controls first of all which aspects
or properties of items are to be indexed,
how and with what indexing structures,
particular pieces of data are indexed, and
which aliases can be used when querying
using property restrictions. What does it
all mean? In simple words, it means that
the Search Schema controls what can be
searched, how it can be searched, and how
the results can be presented in your
Search sites. There are two main parts of
the Search Schema, crawled properties and
managed properties. Let's start with
crawled properties. Once the indexer
passes and crawls your content and its
metadata, it adds the columns as crawled
properties only. This means it has passed
over your columns and the metadata
assigned to each element. You really do
not have any control over the crawled
properties. Those are the resulting list
of columns crawled in some way. A crawled
property by itself is useless for when you
try to run or build search queries or even
display the value of this property in
search results. Now managed properties. To
include the contents and metadata of
crawled properties into the Search index,
you must map crawled properties to managed
properties. Only managed properties are
written into the Search index. You can map
one crawled property to a managed property
or you can map, for example, let's say
both the writer and author crawled
properties to the author managed property.
Managed properties can have multiple
settings such as are they searchable, can
people search by them, can people refine
by them, can they be searched by different
systems, and so on? So every managed
property can be configured in multiple
different ways. Next up, a configuration
option in order to customize Search is
search dictionaries. You can use search
dictionaries to include or exclude company
names to be extracted from the content of
your indexed document. This will map the
company's managed properties and then you
can configure that managed property as you
see fit. You can also include or exclude
words for query spelling correction. As a
global or SharePoint admin in Office 365,
you can also influence the pages or
documents that should appear at the top of
your list of search results by identifying
high-quality pages, also known as
authoritative pages. Authoritative pages
link to the most relevant information and
a typical example could be the home page
of your company portal. You can also add
non-authoritative pages so pages that rank
lower, for example, archives. Next up,
result sources. Result sources limit
searches to certain content or to a subset
of search results. You can use result
sources to send queries to SharePoint
Online of course, but also to SharePoint
on-premises and even external systems such
as Bing. You can also add rules to limit
the subset, for example, your content type
is equal to customer. Another
customization option is query suggestions.
Query spelling suggestions are words that
appear below the search box as a user
types a query. SharePoint automatically
creates word suggestions after you click a
search result for a query at least six
times. For example, if you've entered the
query word coffee and then clicked the
search results six times, coffee
automatically becomes a query suggestion,
but SharePoint allows you to pre-create
them for the most popular content in your
organization. Automatic word suggestions
are generated daily for each result source
and each site collection so the query
suggestions can be different for different
result sources and site collections. Now
the Search Center. The Search Center is a
site that has a starting page where users
enter search queries and a search result
page, where users can drill into and
refine results or run a new query. The big
difference with the Search Center is that
it allows you to search across all tenant,
not in only a specific site, and this is
also where users get redirected when they
click on Search Everything from any Classic Search page.