Now that we have seen the theory, let's go
into the lab and take a look at search
administration. We are now in the live
environment. So let me open up the
SharePoint Admin Center. And to go to the
search administration page, we need to go
into Classic features and then into
Search. This will open up the search
administrator page where we really have
all of the settings related to SharePoint
Online Search. Microsoft Search is not in
the SharePoint Admin Center. It's a
dedicated admin center on its own. So here
we're really managing settings for
SharePoint Search. So first of all the
search schema. Here I can see all of my
managed properties and my crawled
properties. After you create a property,
it might actually take quite a bit of
time, even up to 24 hours, until it's
shown in the crawled properties. One of
the properties we have created in a
previous module is department. So let me,
actually let me spell that properly,
department. And I will see all of the ones
that have to do with department. I can
even see the type of what they are. So I
can see that, for example, this has to do
with people, so it's really the people
department. This one is a taxonomy column,
and this one is a choice column. After my
crawled properties here, I can go into
mapped properties and create a new map
property or change one of the existing
ones. SharePoint Online comes built in
with multiple existing managed properties
that you can change. And it's, for
example, RefinableString, and it goes all
the way up to 135. We also have numbers
and things like that that are refinable.
And if I want to change it, I can go into,
let's say, RefinableString00 and then go
at the bottom and decide what are the
crawled properties mapped to this managed
property. So this is how we can administer
managed properties and crawled properties.
Now instead of clicking back a few times,
let's just reopen the search admin center.
Next up, let's take a look at
authoritative pages. As a reminder,
authoritative web pages are used to rank
results higher. So we can set up the pages
that we recommend as an organization, so
pages from your intranet, pages from your
policies, and things like that. You can
have most authoritative pages,
second‑level authoritative pages,
third‑level, as well as sites to demote,
for example your archives. Back to the
search administration, we also have the
query suggestion settings. So for query
suggestions, we actually need to import
them from a text file, both the always
suggest phrases and the never suggest
phrases. So I can go here, import from
text file. I need to choose a file where
all of the phrases to always suggest are
one phrase per line. Put it in there, and
it might take a few hours, and then those
will always be suggested as people type.
And I can also have things in the never
suggest. This way those things are never
suggested to users. You might want to use
the never suggest phrases if people search
for something and it automatically gets
added in the automatic search suggestions,
and you might want to take it off from
there so it's not suggested to other users
because remember if something is searched
for six times and somebody clicks on
something, it will get added there
automatically. So this is a way to remove
that if there's any phrases that you do
not want. Back to search administration, I
also have the ability to remove search
results. So if there's any results like,
say, some documents got added and we
really want to remove them from search
because maybe they should have never been
added to SharePoint or they contain
sensitive information. Even after you
delete that document from SharePoint, it
might still be available in search until
the next crawl is done and it gets removed
from the index. If you want it to take
effect immediately, you can add the URL to
that document or to that list item and the
URLs to remove, and it will be removed
from search results immediately. Now on
customizing search, something that I want
you to know is that really SharePoint
Search hasn't evolved that much since
SharePoint 2013 since the fast
integration. Now it might change a lot
with Microsoft Search coming in and
Microsoft switching to modern. But if you
really want to look more in depth into
actual customizing search, display
templates, and things like that, I highly
recommend you go into the SharePoint 2013
Search Back to Front by Matthew McDermott
who is an excellent trainer and look
specifically at the SharePoint search
result presentation. You do not need to
listen to previous modules. You can, of
course. But the module you definitely need
to look at is this 51‑minute module, which
will show you in detail how to manage
properties, how to create them, how to
customize query rules, display templates,
and things like that. None of those
settings have really changed since
SharePoint 2013. They might change soon
with modern coming in over the next few
years. But for now, as a lot of people are
still in SharePoint Classic, they will
remain the same. And if really you're
interested into the search customization
and not only administration, I highly
recommend you take a look at this module,
and I will add a link to the course in the
exercise files for this course. We have
reviewed the search admin center and where
you can go to manage search. Now let's go
back to the slides and take a look at how we can monitor SharePoint Search.