SharePoint 2013: Make your site's search rock!

Make your site's search rock

image credit: http://www.morguefile.com/creative/jessiconde

If you are ready to get more out of SharePoint search functionality and help your content consumers find things much more easily, you have a lot of options available.  Below is a summary of a few approaches I have taken which people seem to find useful.  I plan on creating some future posts that dive into more detail.

Scope and dropdown options

First, the scope and options in the dropdown can be changed to just look at a certain library or multiple libraries.  It can even search other sites.  We can put multiple options in the dropdown to point the search at whatever you need. 

Here is an example we set up for a site collection dedicated to project sites:

The first option only returns results that are project sites.  The second option searches all content within the project sites.  The third option performs the "everything" search throughout SharePoint.

For a brief overview of the "Search this site" box and the "Find a file" search, check out this blog post: Find a file vs Search This Site

Refinement panel

After entering your query, the out of the box search will take you to a search page with refiners on the left side.  These can also be modified to allow you to narrow down the results based on categories and columns specific to the content.  So instead of Result type, Author, and Modified date, you can have refiners that use the columns in your lists or libraries.

Some custom refiners we used in this example are "Site name" and "File size".  You can specify other metadata columns from the lists and libraries as long as they are refinable managed properties to help people find the content much easier.

Search verticals

For the project site collection example, there was also a request to only search the titles of items in the sites, so we added that as an option below the search box in the results pages as "Titles only".

Best Bets/Promoted Results

You can have best bets that are just for your site.  So, if your team uses certain web applications, for example, they can appear in your search results even if they aren't inside of SharePoint.

These are just a few of the options available to tailor your search experience for your site to better meet your needs.  Thanks for reading!