Insights Into SharePoint 2013 Search

August 25, 2015

It has been awhile since we have discussed SharePoint 2013 and enterprise search.  Upon reading “SharePoint 2013: Some Observations On Enterprise Search” from Steven Van de Craen’s Blog, we noticed some new insights into how users can locate information on the collaborative content platform.

The first item he brings our attention to is the “content source,” an out-of-the-box managed property option that create result sources that aggregate content from different content sources, i.e. different store houses on the SharePoint.   Content source can become a crawled property.  What happens is that meta elements from Web pages made on SharePoint can be added to crawled properties and can be made searchable content:

“After crawling this Web site with SharePoint 2013 Search it will create (if new) or use (if existing) a Crawled Property and store the content from the meta element. The Crawled Property can then be mapped to Managed Properties to return, filter or sort query results.”

Another useful option was mad possible by a user’s request: making it possible to add query string parameters to crawled properties.  This allows more information to be displayed in the search index.  Unfortunately this option is not available out-of-the-box and it has to be programmed using content enrichment.

Enterprise search on SharePoint 2013 still needs to be tweaked and fine-tuned, especially as users’ search demands become more complex.  It makes us wonder when Microsoft will release the next SharePoint installment and if the next upgrade will resolve some of these issues or will it unleash a brand new slew of problems?  We cannot wait for that can of worms.

Whitney Grace, August 25, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

 

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