The new SharePoint search experience is intuitive, engaging, and easy to use. The site search box appears on the top right of most webpages on your site, allowing you to search the current site and any subsites below it.

The search results page combines three main areas. There is a search box that displays your query, the search results list shown below the search box, and the search refiners displayed at the left of the screen that provide additional filters so that you can narrow the search results to help you find what you are looking for.

The search results page functionality is provided by three interconnected Web Parts: the Search Box Web Part, the Search Results Web Part, and the Refiners Web Part.

A search result is only helpful when you can act on it. On the search results page, you can act on the search results without opening them; this is done by using the hover panel. When you point to a search result, the callout appears to the right of the result, and you can preview the search result content. For example, with a document, the hover panel provides a callout with a live preview, including a deep dive that takes you to the correct part of the document by using deep links. The hover panel also allows you to act on that result with contextual actions based on the result itself. For a document, the menu of actions includes options to edit the document, to follow the document, to send its link to other people, and to open the library where the document resides. For a webpage, the actions include options to open the page or send its link to other people. The search results are security trimmed so only the content and actions that a user has rights to are displayed.

A search result may be displayed with additional indicators, depending on the type. For example, Microsoft Office files, such as Word or Excel, are displayed with the application icon in front of the title of the search result, whereas newsfeed conversations are displayed with the number of replies and the number of Likes.

In addition to using a search box on your site, you can also use an Enterprise Search Center or a Basic Search Center to enter search queries and view the search results. Both Search Centers provides an ability to search an entire enterprise, including all SharePoint sites, files shares, and Microsoft Exchange folders, as well as other content sources that are set up by your SharePoint administrator. The Enterprise Search Center requires the SharePoint Server 2013 while the Basic Search Center is available in all SharePoint 2013 on-premises solutions.

The Enterprise Search Center provides several pages known as search verticals. Search verticals are search pages that are targeted for searching specific content, including Everything, for a search across all content; People, for specific people searches; Conversations, for searching newsfeed conversations; and Videos, for searching different types of videos. The list of search verticals is located under the search box in the Search Center page. Search verticals provide different search experiences and display search results that are filtered and formatted for content that is specific to this vertical.

The links that let users move quickly between the search verticals are displayed by the Search Navigation Web Part. By default, the Search Navigation Web Part is set up to show links to the Everything, People, Conversations, and Videos search verticals. The Search Navigation Web Part gets search results from the Search Results Web Part. When users click a link for a search vertical, the search results are displayed according to the search vertical configuration.

The Basic Search Center provides a single search results page, without the search verticals.

In this exercise, you will explore the search results page and use refiners to narrow your search.

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 an aggregated database 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 using a process called content crawling. By default, the content is crawled incrementally once every 20 minutes, 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. In this case, 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 that you enter, the more specific and precise your query becomes, thereby producing a more focused result set. Search queries can include any of the following items:

SharePoint uses an implicit AND query when you search for multiple words or multiple phrases. For example, when you search for the multiple, separate words “oak” and “furniture,” the search 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, if either word or phrase appears in a document, that document appears in the result set. You can create more 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 word “chest” and “furniture.”

In earlier chapters of 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. For those metadata properties that store text, in the search box, use the syntax property:value where value is a word or phrase. For example, you can use the following default metadata properties for more targeted searches:

SharePoint Server 2013 supports managed metadata, which is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define, and then use as attributes for content items. Consistent use of metadata across sites in your organization helps with content discoverability. As you have seen in the previous exercise, by using a metadata property as a search refiner, a user can filter search results based on metadata.

In this exercise, you will use search queries for targeted searches of your site.

Search functionality is flexible and configurable, and you can tailor the search experience for your site. The Search Settings on the Site Settings page allow you to specify the search behavior on you site. The search box and the search results page will use these settings.

Using the Search Settings, you can add the link to an Enterprise Search Center, where users can search everything in your company. Then, the search verticals will be shown in the Search Navigation Web Part on the search result pages on your sites. In addition, the search box on your site can include the drop-down list with search verticals from the Search Center. The users will be able to choose whether to search your site only, or choose the search verticals to search across all sites and other content sources using the Search Center. The default setting for the search box is the site where it is located. You can also add an additional search vertical by using a search navigation configuration for a site. The new link to the vertical will be shown in the Search Navigation Web Part on search result pages, and it can also be shown as a drop-down list in the search box.

In the following exercise, you will configure a Search Center URL, and then test the search behavior on your site. You will need to know the URL of the Enterprise Search Center in your SharePoint environment to complete this exercise.

SharePoint provides the form to construct search queries in the Advanced Search page. Using Advanced Search, you can include or exclude words and phrases in the query, filter results by document format, narrow results by language, and filter results by content properties.

In the following exercise, you will construct a query that searches for documents that contain “oak chest”, are in English, and have an Author property that contains “Bill Malone”.

You can set up a search alert on a search results page so that you receive an email or an SMS text message when the results change for that search query. You can set up alerts on any site search results page, as well as a Search Center results page.

You can choose the type of changes that you’d like to be notified of, such as only when there are new items in the search results or only when existing items change, or whether you’d like to be alerted to all changes. You can also set the frequency of alerts to be daily or weekly.

In the following exercise, you will set up an alert for the advanced search query that you performed in the previous exercise.

You have set up a search alert to be notified by email of changes to the search results on a daily basis.

When the results of the search are displayed, the search engine calculates the relevance rank; in other words, the order in which the search results appear. SharePoint Search uses several ranking models that are based on the predefined algorithms that calculate the ranking score of a particular item in the search results. By default, search results are sorted in descending order based on their ranking score. Items with the top score get the top position in search results. Rank is the order in which search results are displayed.

Using the search index, the ranking models combine weighted scores for a number of different criteria, including content, metadata, file type, and interaction. For example, depending on your business environment, it may be that some file types are more important from a ranking perspective than others are, and therefore their scores would be higher. Typically, Word and Microsoft Office PowerPoint search results have higher scores than Excel results, and therefore they are displayed higher in the search results page. Another example is an interaction score that is based on the number of times a search result is clicked, and on the queries that led to a result being clicked. For the final ranking score of a search result, all ranking criteria in the ranking model are combined.

SharePoint provides a mechanism to influence the ranking of search results by using query rules. A query rule consists of a query rule condition and a query rule action. When a query matches a query rule condition, it triggers a query rule action. For example, by using a query rule, you can show a search result above all ranked results. This result is called a promoted result. You can also group several results in a result block, and then promote the group in the same way.

For example, you can promote a specific page that contains important information for site visitors to be aware of so that a link to this page appears on top of all search results for a particular period of time—for example, a day. Or you can promote a specific content item to display at the top of the search results when the user searches for particular topics.

In the following exercise, you will create a query rule that will promote the Oak Furniture library to display at the top of search results when a user searches for “oak” or “furniture.”

You will often find that you need to display an item on top of the search results page for all search queries, unconditionally, for a limited period. In the following exercise, you will create a query rule that will display an existing webpage at the top of search results on all search queries, active from today until the end of tomorrow.

On your site, a user enters search queries into a search box and views the search results using the default search results page. On the Enterprise Search Center site, there is a default search page where the search box is located, as well as several search verticals. Search verticals are customized search results pages targeted for searching specific content. By default, the Web Parts on the search vertical pages are the same. However, the query in the Search Results Web Part is executed against a particular result source configured differently for each search vertical page. With the Everything vertical, for example, the query is executed against the Local SharePoint Results, which is a default result source that covers all content in your SharePoint installation, with the exception of people. For the People vertical, the search runs against Local People Results, a result source that defines the search results in the vertical page.

Several Web Part pages provide the search experience in the Enterprise Search Center site, including the following:

All of these search results pages are located in the Pages library and contain the same Web Parts, as follows:

You can customize Web Parts within the search results pages and configure the different Web Parts settings to modify the pages’ behavior. The Pages library is configured to require checkout, so you need to check in and publish your changes to the search results pages before other users can see them.

In the following exercise, you will modify the default search results page and configure properties of the Refinement Web Part.

The People vertical provides the ability to search for people in your organization against the default result source Local People Results, which is dedicated to people information. The profile store and personal sites are a major source of information for a people search. The profile store is crawled on a regular basis in a similar way to other SharePoint sites, and the content is added to a people-specific index that the search queries in the People vertical are executed against. Conceptually, a user profile is treated as a document about that person, with the person’s name as the title.

At a basic level, the more search query terms that appear in the person’s profile, the more relevant the result. The people search ranking models differ from the information search ranking models. The relevance rank is assigned to search results that are related to people, and subsequently there are specific relevance criteria that include social distance and expertise. On the People vertical search results page, you can sort the results by relevance, name, and social distance.

Social distance is computed based on colleague relationship. For example, people who are on the same work team as you will be close to you in regards to social distance. You may also follow other people and content, and other people may follow you. You may participate in conversations with them, and they provide regular comments on your Newsfeed. You may also be a member of mailing lists and discussion groups, so you would be considered closer to the members of the same groups than to those who are not members, because your visibility to other people in these groups is higher. The search engine takes this data into consideration when calculating social distance.

Basic expertise information is collected from the user profile; in particular, the Ask Me About and Skills fields. Other fields are also taken into account, including Past projects and Interests, and more importantly, the documents that users worked on that are relevant to the search query. To get the best results from a people search, people in your organization should add as much information as they can to their user profiles in the profile store, as well as in their personal sites.

In the next exercise, you will enter information to your user profile, and then explore the People vertical search results page.

By default, all local sites are included in the search results on the Enterprise Search Center. The local sites are crawled and their content is indexed and included in the default result source Local SharePoint Results. Sometimes you might need to exclude a site from the search results, even though the users in your organization have access rights to it. For example, when you are redesigning or updating a site, you might want to temporarily exclude this site from showing in search results. The Search and Offline Availability page in the Search group in Site Settings provides an option to define whether the site is indexed, and thus, is visible in the search results. When you exclude your site from search, you also exclude all its subsites.

In the following exercise, you will exclude a site from the search results, and then bring it back again.