Before discussing the execution of a search query, certain basic concepts must be covered. A search query contains one or more words that represent the content that you are trying to find. When executing a query, SharePoint returns a set of content items that form a result set. Your queries are executed against a summary of the content, known as an index, which enables SharePoint to respond quickly. You can think of the search index as similar to the index you find at the end of this book. The index is updated periodically. By default, it is refreshed once every hour, but the frequency can be configured differently by your SharePoint administrator. Therefore, when you create new data in your SharePoint site, such as a new announcement, it may not appear immediately in your result set. Similarly, if you delete a document from a document library, it still may appear in the result set, but when you click the link for the document, an error message, “The webpage cannot be found,” displays. The link to the document in the result set is called a broken link.

To find information, you may need to enter more than one query term. The more query terms you enter, the more discriminating your query becomes, thereby producing a more focused result set. Search queries can comprise any of the following items:

SharePoint does an implicit AND when you search for multiple words or multiple phrases. For example, when you search for the multiple, separate words “oak” and “furniture,” the result set contains only those content items where both words occur. Those words do not have to be side by side, but they do both need to be in the content item somewhere. If a document contains the words “oak” and “chest” but not “oak” and “furniture,” that document will not appear in the result set. When you search for the complete phrase “oak furniture,” the result set contains only those content items where the two words “oak furniture” appear together.

When you use two words or two phrases in your search query and separate them by the word OR, then when either word or phrase appears in a document, that document appears in the result set. You can create complex search queries, such as (chest OR furniture) AND oak. This will return content items that contain the words “oak” and “chest” or the words “oak” and “furniture,” but will not return content items that contain the words “chest” and “furniture.”

In earlier chapters in this book, you used columns on lists and libraries to save list item and document property values, also known as metadata. You can use some of these metadata properties to help you create powerful search queries, thereby creating a more focused result set. Some of the default metadata properties are listed here. For those metadata properties that store text, in the search box, use the syntax property:value where value is a word or phrase.

When you enter a search query on the home page of your site, the result set will return content items from the current site and any subsites below it. When you use a view to display the contents of a list or library and you enter a search query in the search box on those pages, the result set will contain only content items from that list or library. On the Search Results page, you will see a Search Scope drop-down list to the left of the search box, which displays the scope of your result set. For example, if you entered a search query on the home page of your site, then in the scope list, This Site is selected. When you enter a search query on a list or library view, then the This List scope is selected on the Search Results page. You can then use the scope list to broaden your search query to This Site.

In this exercise, you will familiarize yourself with the interface and enter a query phrase to observe how the results are more focused when multiple phrases and properties are entered in the search box.

When you are using an Office application, you often need to search for information to include in your document. Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010 suites include the Research pane specifically for this reason. The Research pane can display information from local and online thesauruses, translation services, search engines, and business and financial sites. You can also configure the Research pane to retrieve information from other sources, such as SharePoint websites.

The Research pane organizes the sources of information into categories. By default, queries are performed against the All Reference Books category. When you search for information, you can specify an entire category or a single service. Once you have typed a word or phrase into the Research pane search box, the results of the search query are displayed, organized by service in collapsible sections. To view or hide the results for a particular service, use the + or - button in the section header for that service. The Research pane stores the results of previous searches for the duration of the session and provides Back and Forward buttons to navigate through the search result history.

The Research pane can be opened using one of the following methods:

When you open the Research pane using one of the last two methods in this list, the word or phrase that you click is used as the search query and immediately executed against the default research category to produce the search results.

In this exercise, you will configure the Research pane to connect to a SharePoint site, and then you will use the Research pane to search for content on that SharePoint site.