Microsoft Search lets you effortlessly find and discover content that you need in order to complete your everyday tasks. It then presents this content back to you through a modern and easy-to-navigate user experience. The content that Microsoft Search returns is highly personalized to your work patterns and what's trending around you—things you've been working on (based on your activity in Microsoft 365), who you work with, activity in the content shared with you and with them, and so on. This personalization experience, coupled with advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms, brings the relevant content back to you even without you having to specifically search for it. If you have been working with a particular set of files, interacting with certain people, or working within the context of certain sites, Microsoft Search will automatically show this content to you even without you having to search for it. This content is presented to you through various means:

• You will see results by just clicking anywhere inside the search box, even before you start typing text, as shown in the following screenshot:

• Through the Recommendedand Discoversections on the Microsoft 365 home page, as shown in the following screenshot:

• Through various pages and sections in Delve, as shown in the following screenshot. Note that the list of people shown in the following screenshot is again based on your behavioral and environment patterns in Microsoft 365:

• Various web parts on SharePoint, such as the Highlighted content, News, and Site activity web parts.

Microsoft Search is available everywhere via the search box in the header area of all the Microsoft 365 apps, as shown in the following image:

This makes it very easy to get to the content you are looking for. Let's say that you are working on a PowerPoint presentation and need to look up content from the corresponding Word document. You can simply search for the Word document right from within the search box in PowerPoint.

Additionally, Microsoft Search is aware of the context of the app you are searching from. So, if you are searching from within a SharePoint list or library, it will scope the search to that list or library. Searching from a SharePoint site will first return you results from that site, but will also let you easily switch the context to the corresponding hub or the entire organization.

Some other examples of contextual searches are when you perform a search from the following workloads (at the time of writing):

• Outlook: Searching from Outlook will return results from within Outlook.
• Yammer: Searching from Yammer will return files and conversations from within Yammer.
• Teams: While files shared through Teams are stored in SharePoint and/ or OneDrive, the conversations are not. You can therefore only search for any Teams conversations from within Microsoft Teams.

Furthermore, SharePoint online offers two flavors of search:

• The more modern, personalized, and intelligent search experience: The modern SharePoint search utilizes Microsoft Search for a more modern search experience. As previously described, this experience is consistent across most workloads of Microsoft 365.
• The classic search experience: The classic search experience is what you will see in the classic SharePoint sites. This experience is slowly being deprecated.

Both of these experiences utilize the same underlying search index, meaning that the underlying source of truth for both search experiences is the same, however, the modern search applies machine learning coupled with usage analytics to this index to bring back what's more relevant to you. It then uses a more modern user experience to display these results back to you. We will see the modern search experience in this book. Please go tohttps://m365book.page.link/Search-Classic-Modern if you would like to understand the differences between classic and modern search experiences in SharePoint.

Finally, we learned how to perform a basic search as part of the Searching Content recipe in Chapter 2, Introduction to SharePoint Online. In this chapter, we will look at the more advanced capabilities and some specific use cases of Microsoft Search.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Performing an advanced search
• Finding experts and people
• Searching with Bing Search

Performing an advanced search

Just like any other search engine, Microsoft Search supports advanced search queries. You can build these advanced queries by adding various operators and property filters to the search keywords. This recipe will show you how to do that.

For our scenario, let's say that, as a product design engineer, I am working on a design proposal for a new product. I remember that a similar proposal was presented by one of my colleagues, Irvin Sayers, in the not so recent past. I liked the proposal and would like to use it as a template for my presentation. In this recipe, we will see how I can use an advanced search to narrow down the results to quickly find this proposal.

Getting ready

You can access Microsoft Search from any workload in your Microsoft 365 tenant. You can also search from within the apps that are installed locally on your computer, as long as they are connected to the Microsoft 365 tenant. Search will only return results from the content to which you have at leastreadaccess.

How to do it...

To perform an advanced search, we will begin with a routine search and then start narrowing down the results through advanced parameters to find exactly what we are looking for. To do so, go through the following steps:

1. Browse to the Microsoft 365 home page for your tenant.

2. Based on what I am looking for, I will begin my search by typing design in the search box at the top of the page.

3. As shown in the following screenshot, this returns a lot of results. Along with the people that these results return, some of these results are related to branding and visual design:

4. To remove these unwanted results, I will go ahead and add the following advanced filters to my search text:
   • I will add the text -visual to it since I am not looking for visual design.
   • Also, since I am specifically looking for presentations, I will add the text FileExtension:pptx.

5. Entering the preceding filters as text in the search box further narrows down the search results to just presentations surrounding product design and overviews, as shown in the following screenshot:

6. Finally, since I know that the design proposal was presented by my colleague, Irvin, I am going to add a filter that shows only the documents authored by him. To do so, I will add Author:irvin to my search text:
7. This narrows down the search results to exactly what I was looking for. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Congratulations! We just learned how to use advanced search in SharePoint Online to narrow down the search results and find exactly what we were looking for.

How it works...

Microsoft Search, just like any other search, has the following components to it:

• Crawler: This is the part of the search engine that scours the content in your tenant and then uses a content processing engine to transform it intoa suitable format for the indexer to use.
• Indexer: This part of the search engine organizes and indexes the content in a format that is easily searchable.
• Query component: This part of the search engine is responsible for processing the user search queries, filtering the results, ranking them, and sending them back to the user.
• UI: The UI is the part of the search engine that lets the users submit queries, send them to the query component, and eventually render the results.

Microsoft Search not only crawls and indexes the content, but also the underlying properties and column names. For each SharePoint column that the crawler encounters, it creates a corresponding property within its crawl database.

This additionally enables you to query and filter the content by easily specifying the property or column names. We saw this earlier in this recipe when we specifically filtered the results by the Author column.

This capability, coupled with a proper information architecture that uses consistent column names, goes a long way in helping users quickly find the right content. We discussed the concept of content types and the content type hub in Creating a content type and adding columns to it recipe of Chapter 6, Term Store and Content Types in SharePoint Online. Imagine the following scenario, keeping the concepts from that recipe in mind:

• You have defined a base content type and published it through the content type hub, for use in all the libraries in your organization.
• This content type contains a managed metadatasite column called Department.
• The content type and the corresponding site column then gets replicated to every department site.
• You then optionally update the site column for each such department site and set its default value to represent the particular department name.
• Now, any documents uploaded to libraries using this content type will automatically get tagged by the name of the corresponding department (or users will need to manually select the department name if the defaults are not specified).
• Because these columns were created as site columns, the search crawler will create crawled and managed properties for this column.
• Users across the organization will now easily be able to filter the search results by the department name and quickly narrow them down to the exact content that the user is looking for.

Such an arrangement involves more upfront planning and setting up time, but helps achieve better user satisfaction and increased productivity.

Certain columns, such as the managed metadata column, require some additional handling before they can be used in filters. The following articles describe these steps in more detail. Note that even though they are written for SharePoint Server, the steps are equally valid for SharePoint Online:

• From site column to managed property – What's up with that: https://m365book.page.link/Managed-Properties
• Mapping crawled properties to pre-defined managed properties: https://m365book.page.link/Map-SearchProperties

Fine-tuning search and keyword query language

Microsoft Search presents a very simple user interface along with a very powerful underlying search engine. This engine will return results for most of your queries, but if you are not getting the expected results back, then you can implement the following measures:

• Ensure that sufficient time has elapsed since the content was created. Referring to the search components described earlier, the crawler component needs to first crawl the content, process it, and submit it to the index before it can be searched. This usually happens at scheduled intervals, which means that there's a slight lag between the time the content gets created and the time it shows up in the search results. Usually, this process is almost instantaneous, but sometimes it can take up to 4 hours or more before you or other site users get the newly created content back as part of the search results.
• Unlike some public search engines, Microsoft Search is currently susceptible to spelling errors and does not provide a 'Did you mean...?' functionality for incorrect spellings. This means that if the text is misspelled in the content of your query, then Microsoft Search will (currently) not be able to find it.
• As mentioned previously, Microsoft Search may return different results for the same search depending on who is searching for content. The result ranking in a modern search is based on complicated machine learning algorithms that take into account your activity, patterns, and environment. So, it might be that others may see a result higher up in the results list while you see it a little lower. You can always refine your queries to get more focused results if needed.
• Everything in Search is permission-based. This means that you will only see results that you have at least read access to. If you have tried refining the queries and are still not seeing results that others are seeing, then there's a possibility that you may not have access to that content.
• SharePoint understands an advanced query syntax called the keyword query language (KQL). KQL helps you build highly focused and complex queries. The information at https://m365book.page.link/Search-KQL explains the various elements of a KQL in more detail.

The article athttps://m365book.page.link/Search-Tuning discusses more details as to how to fine-tune your search if you are getting too few or too many results.

There's more...

Microsoft Search comes with quite a few admin settings that can be used to significantly alter the search experience. The following section provides an outline of such admin settings.

Owner and admin controls

You can apply admin settings at various levels to control what shows up in the search results and how:

• As a list or library owner, you can choose to exclude your list, library, or content from the search results. This setting is available from within the Advanced settings page for your list or library.
• As a site owner, you can similarly specify various settings for the site. Most of these settings are geared toward the classic search experience; however, some settings apply to both the classic and modern experiences. The ability to exclude the site and its contents from showing up in search results is one such setting. This can be accessed from the Search and offline availability page under Site Settings. This page also lets a site owner view and make limited changes to the search schema.

Finally, as a global admin or a tenant search admin, I can control various aspects of the organization-wide search experience. In addition to managing the search schema, the following are some settings related to the modern experience that you can manage through the Microsoft Search admin center:

• View organization-wide search usage reports, as described at https://m365book.page.link/Search-Usage.
• Help create predefined search results, such as acronyms, bookmarks, Q and A's, locations, and floor plans. These predefined results are based on the most commonly used scenarios for your user experience and show up before the other results do. Note that these result types show up only when the search is being done across the organization, and not when the search is narrowly scoped (such as when searching in a list, library, or site). You can read more about these in the Provide answers section (in the navigation towards the left of the page) at https://m365book.page.link/Provide-Answers.
• Create and configure connectors to search and bring back results from external data sources. You can read more about this at https://m365book.page.link/Search-Connectors.
• Make additional configuration changes to the search. You can read more about these configuration changes in the Customize and configure section (in the navigation towards the left of the page) at https://m365book.page.link/Search-Customize.
  Some examples of these configuration changes are as follows:
  • Creating search verticals
  • Changing the search result layouts
  • Managing the classic versus modern search experience in SharePoint
  • Turning Bing Search on or off (see the Searching with Bing Search, recipe later in this chapter)

Please note that some of these features were in preview at the time of writing this book and may or may not be available in your organization's Microsoft 365 tenant.

See also

• The Searching content recipe in, Chapter 2, Introduction to SharePoint Online
• The Creating a content type and adding columns to it recipe in, Chapter 6, Term Store and Content Types in SharePoint Online
• The Viewing and changing list settings recipe in, Chapter 4, Working with Lists and Libraries in SharePoint Online
• The Viewing and changing site settings recipe in, Chapter 3, Working with Modern Sites in SharePoint Online

Finding experts and people

Microsoft Search in SharePoint not only helps you find documents but also helps you find people. You can search for people based on who they are, where they work, or what role they fulfill in the organization.

Continuing the example from the previous recipe, let's say that I am looking for help with creating the product design proposal. This recipe will show you how you can use Microsoft Search to search your organization for an expert to help with it. It will then show you how you can also reach out to them through your favorite communication tools from within that interface.

Getting ready

Unless your organization disables it, people search is enabled by default and is available to anyone in the organization who has access to Microsoft 365.

How to do it...

To look for someone with design skills, go through the following steps:

1. Browse to the Microsoft 365 home page for your tenant.
2. Type the text designer in the search box at the top.
3. You should see person results after the first few document results. You can also click the People tab to just view the people-only results, as shown in the following screenshot:

4. In this example, I can see that the first result that was returned was Grady Archie, who has the word Designer in his job title. I can then click on Grady's name to see more details about him. Doing so opens his Profile card (also known as the Contact card), as shown in the following screenshot:

5. In the Overview tab of his profile card, I can view various aspects of his profile, such as his contact information, his manager and colleagues, files he has shared, my recent email conversations with him, and his LinkedIn profile.

6. Clicking a different tab from the profile card shows further details surrounding these areas in that tab. Clicking the Contact tab, as an example, shows additional details about Grady, such as his skills, education, and the projects that he has worked on, as shown in the following screenshot:

7. Going by his profile summary, I can see that this matches exactly with who I am looking for. Hence, I can click Start chatto open Grady's profile in Teams (or Skype for Business), as shown in the following screenshot:

8. From here, I can call him or start a chat with him using the familiar Teams interface.

Congratulations! You just learned how to perform a people search in Microsoft 365 and then learned how to contact them directlyusing a familiar tool of your choice.

How it works...

An enhanced people search lets you identify the right people in your organization by using attributes, such as designer, and assists in obtaining answers or help quickly. In the preceding example, with one attribute, Microsoft Search identified Grady as a design subject matter expert.

From that point on, the deep contextual information returned by Microsoft Search through the user profile card created efficiencies for us, improving productivity by reducing the friction of switching between apps and browser tabs. We can quickly send an email to or chat with the identified expert without having to leave the browser. We can also see other details about them, such as their location, in case we'd like to get in touch with them.

In addition to performing a generic search, as we did in this recipe, you can also use pre-configured managed properties (see the previous recipe to understand managed properties in more detail) to perform a highly targeted search. Some examples are as follows:

• jobtitle: *design*: This will return all profiles where the job title partially or fully matches the word design. Following the example from the recipe, this will bring back Grady's profile, since his job title is Designer.
• schools: Michigan:This search will bring back all profiles where the person's school name contains Michigan.
• skills: *design*: This search will bring back all profiles where the person's skill partially matches the word design. An example of this search is shown in the following screenshot:

Please note that the targeted search mentioned previously, as well as the information being returned through Microsoft search and profile cards, is contingent on it being maintained in the first place. The HR department in your organization is typically the one that would solicit the creation and maintenance of such employee profile information. The IT department then helps set up the synchronization of this information to Microsoft 365. These departments will subsequently need to work hand in hand so that this profile information is regularly maintained. It's highly recommended that you expend some timeupfront to plan and set up the backend processes (either manual or automated) so that this information stays up to date. More often than not, stale information being presented through the search experience or through other workloads in Microsoft 365 can discourage users from effectively utilizing the platform.

See also

• The Performing an advanced search recipe, earlier in this chapter

Searching with Bing Search

Bing is a web search engine that is owned and operated by Microsoft. If you have a Microsoft 365 work account and you perform a search from within Bing, you can also get results from your organization in addition to the usual web results that are returned by the search engine. Of course, all of this is available to you in a multitude of browsers across a variety of device types.

This recipe will show you how to use Bing as your one-stop search engine for not only bringing back public results from the web but also the results from within your organization's Microsoft 365 environment. For illustration purposes, we will use the same scenario that we did in the Advanced Search in SharePoint Online recipe, earlier in this chapter. As a product design engineer, I am working on a design proposal for a new product. In the recent past, I remember that a similar proposal was presented by one of my colleagues, Irvin Sayers. I liked the proposal and would like to use it as a template for my proposal. In this recipe, we will see how I can use Bing Search to quickly find this proposal.

Getting ready

Your organization should have enabled Microsoft Search for Bing. Also, to view your work results alongside the web search results, you will need to log in to Bing using your work credentials; this recipe will also show you how to do this. Other than that, the requirements for viewing your work results in Bing are the same as those for the regular Microsoft 365 search, in that it will only return results for which you at least have read access.

How to do it...

To view your company's Microsoft 365 results in Bing Search, perform the following steps:

1. Open your favorite browser and browse to https://www.bing.com/.
2. Click the Sign in link in the top-right corner of the Bing search page, as shown in the following screenshot:

3. Doing so will take you to a familiar Microsoft sign-in experience, where you can enter your Microsoft 365 credentials to sign in.
4. Once signed in, you will be brought back to the Bing home page, with the sign-in button and corresponding image replaced by your details from your organization's Microsoft 365 environment.

5. Since I am looking for a design proposal that was presented by Irvin Sayers, I am going to search Bing for any files that were authored or modified by him. To do so, I will enter the text Irvin Sayers files in the search box and press the Enter key.
6. This will bring back the file search results from my organization that is centered around Irvin. As shown in the following screenshot, the design proposal I was searching for shows as the first result. This is likely because there's current activity trending around that file and/or the machine learning algorithm identified this file to be of greater relevance to me compared to the other file results:

7. Clicking the Hide button in the top-right corner, as shown in the preceding screenshot, will hide the organization results and just show you the web results.

That's it! You just learned how to use Bing as the one-stop search engine to bring back not only internet results but also results from your organization.

How it works...

We discussed the different components of Search as part of the Performing an advanced searchrecipe earlier in this chapter. Bing's search works by securely tapping into your organization's search index and using its own query and UI components. This enables Bing search to serve some advanced queries, in addition to the more common and simplistic queries that it can also return search results for. Some examples of such advanced queries include the following:

• Searching formy filesormy documentsreturns the most recent documents that you worked on:

• Searching for <employee name> org, <employee name> direct reports, or <employee name> manager returns the organization chart for the employee:

• Searching for Conversations about <topic> returns conversations from Teams and Yammer:

You can also perform some of the other regular kinds of search through the Bing organization search, such as searching for people:

This returns not only the person's contact details but also their files and conversations. Furthermore, you can also click the Show profile link to view the familiar people profile card.

Remember that, irrespective of where you perform the search from or what search you perform, you will always only see content that you have access to through security and permissions. In the preceding screenshot, I see those files and conversations only because they were individually shared with me, one of the groups that I am a member of, or with the entire organization.

See also

• The Performing an advanced search recipe, earlier in this chapter
• The Finding experts and peoplerecipe, earlier in this chapter