I recently ran into the issue of a document appearing in search results that didn’t use the name field OR the title field. I was perplexed by this until checking the search schema for the “Title” field. In an attempt to be helpful, there’s a property called MetadataExtractorTitle that was given higher preference than the actual title field. To fix this, I simply had to bump it down the list a bit.
Scenario
The document in question is a SharePoint Governance meeting agenda named SP Governance – 2017-11-17.
It appeared correctly in its library, which is to be expected:
And a look at its properties revealed there was no Title value, meaning it would default to the document name.
However, when searching for “SP” I found the document listed as “Agenda.” This was used because the MetadataExtractorProperty found “Agenda” within the document as a potential title (as the first line of the document).
Solution
Note: You must be at least a site collection administrator.
Go to Site Settings at the top level of the site collection for the document library.
Choose “Search Schema” under Site Collection Administration (not just “Schema” under search – that’s only site level)
Search for title and edit the property
Move “MetadataExtractorTitle” down until it’s beneath ows_Title. Click OK when finished.
Click to enlarge
Checking your work
After fixing the schema, go back to the document library and re-index it to check. (Library Settings –> Advanced Settings –> Reindex Document Library)
This will have the library re-crawled during the next incremental crawl (interval depends on administrator settings). Alternatively, you could trigger it immediately or run a full crawl.
Once the crawl has run, try your search again. Your items should now have a correct title when appearing in search results.
In an on-prem environment, it’s convenient to be able to run Chrome as a test user with general permissions instead of my admin permissions. This possibility makes it so I don’t need to remote to another machine or log out and in with another account just for a simple check.
If you have a shortcut to Chrome on your desktop (not your task bar), skip ahead to step two.
1. Search “Chrome” from the start menu, right click and select “Open File Location”
2. Hold “Shift” on your keyboard and right-click the Internet Explorer icon. Select “run as different user”
3. Enter the credentials for the second user (your screen/prompt may look different) and click OK/Login. In some cases, you may be prompted to enter these more than once.
Chrome will now run as if the other user is logged in.
It’s often helpful in our on-prem environment to be able to run IE as a test user with general permissions instead of my admin permissions. This possibility makes it so I don’t need to remote to another machine or log out and in with another account just for a simple check.
If you have a shortcut to IE on your desktop (not your task bar), skip ahead to step two.
Search “IE” from the start menu, right click and select “Open File Location”
2. Hold “Shift” on your keyboard and right-click the Internet Explorer icon. Select “run as different user”
3. Enter the credentials for the second user (your screen/prompt may look different) and click OK/Login. In some cases, you may be prompted to enter these more than once.
IE will now run as if the other user is logged in.
If you want to see which groups a user belongs to, or how an individual is granted (or restricted) access to a particular site or resource, use the “Check permissions” button in Site Settings –> Site Permissions (or any advanced permissions page).
SharePoint 2016 example of checking permissionsSharePoint Online example of checking permissions (see specific allowances)
Note: Screenshots and steps from a 2016 environment
There may be times when you have AD accounts showing up in search results that you can’t delete, but need to hide from results. The following sections will guide you through removing specific profiles from your people search results.
Steps:
Create a mapped property for user profiles
Use the new property at least once
Start a full crawl of people source
Create a managed property mapped to your new user property
Start a full crawl of site source
Edit the query on the people search results page
(optional) If you have “People Results” as “Promoted Results” or “Ranked Result Blocks”
1. Create a mapped property for user profiles
From Central admin, click on “Manage service applications”
Select “user profile service application”
Click “Manage User Properties” under “People”
Select “New Property”
Set the new properties settings as follows:
Name and display name: RemoveFromPeopleSearch
Policy Setting: Optional
Default Privacy Setting: Everyone
Search settings, Alias: checked
Click to enlarge
Click OK.
2. Use the new property at least once
For the rest to work, you’ll need to mark at least one user profile to not show up in search. I did this by adding a “1” to the property we just created for a user I wished to remove from results.
Back under “User profile service application” (Central admin –> Manage service applications –> “User profile service application”) click on “Manage user profiles.”
Search for and edit the profile of who you’d like to remove from search results.
4. Edit the query on the people search results page
Once your crawl is finished (may take a while), you’ll want to go to your people search results page and “Edit page.”
Click to enlarge
Edit the “Results” web part
In the menu that appears on the right, select “Change Query.”
If you’re not in advanced mode, switch to advanced mode. Then expand the “property filter” dropdown and select “show all managed properties.”
Try the dropdown again, and now you’ll see your new property listed. Select it and click “OK
Set properties as follows and click “Add property filter”
Click OK
Click “Apply” on the web part menu
Click “Save” and publish (if checked out)
5. (optional) If you have “People Results” as “Promoted Results” or “Ranked Result Blocks”
If you have people results outside your regular people search (such as a promoted result block in Local SharePoint Results) you’ll just need to be sure to also add the RemoveFromPeopleSearch<>1 string to the end of your query rule’s query.
Query rules can be accessed through central admin (manage service applications –> search service application –> query rules) or from Site Settings –> Query rules depending on where you initially setup your query rules/promoted results.
via site settings
via central admin
Edit the query rule in question, click “edit” next to the result block that’s relevant, then “Launch Query Builder” to be able to add the RemoveFromPeopleSearch<>1 string to your query.
Applies to SharePoint 2016, can be adapted for O365
If you’re connecting to an external list of significant size, you may run into the following error:
Database Connector has throttled the response. The response from database contains more than ‘2000’ rows. The maximum number of rows that can be read through Database Connector is ‘2000’. The limit can be changed via the ‘Set-SPBusinessDataCatalogThrottleConfig’ cmdlet.
1. Log into your SharePoint server
2. Open your SharePoint 2016 Management Shell as administrator (right-click, run as administrator)
3. Connect to your site
Connect-Site -url https://sharepoint.contoso.com
4. Get ALL service application Proxy IDs (you’ll need this in a later step)
Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy
5. Note the ID of the “Business Data Con…” application
6. Set a new variable “$serviceapp” to that app using the ID you noted as its identity
If someone searches in SharePoint for “Power BI,” chances are they aren’t looking for a document from 2016 that happens to mention the phrase “Power BI.”
Using out-of-the-box search reports you can come to understand what phrases are being searched (and abandoned) on your intranet, then improve search by promoting/suggesting results you think your users are actually seeking.
I’m going to use my “Power BI” example. If a user searches Power BI on my dev environment, they get these as the top three results. The first two are SharePoint link lists (like promoted links or otherwise) and the third is just a document about embedding Power BI reports. None take you
Let’s make it easier to get directly to our app.powerbi.com portal when searched on the intranet.
Go to central admin –> Manage service applications
Select “Search service application”
Select Query Rules from the left nav
Select “Local SharePoint Results” from the first dropdown
Click “New Query Rule”
Name the rule and enter semi-colon separated phrases you want to trigger our promoted result
Click “Add promoted result”
Complete the form, keeping in mind that the “Title” and “Description” are what will appear in results when searched. Click Save.
Click Save again. Changes are immediate, and your promoted result will appear FIRST in results with a checkmark icon to indicate it’s promoted/suggested
Test your search
Note: If you use SharePoint Online, your navigation to the query rules is a bit different but still starts in central admin. The rest of the steps are the same.
There are three possible causes I’m aware of that you should check if you receive this message:
Central admin settings not configured properly
Site collection settings not configured properly
You’re using a Project Web App (PWA) site template and can only fix this on SharePoint Server
I’ll cover the solutions for each in the same order:
Central admin
Go to central admin –> manage web applications
Select the web app on which you received the error and select “SharePoint Designer” from the general settings drop-down. Make sure the first box is checked and click “OK.”
Site collection settings
Go to site settings –> SharePoint Designer Settings (under Site Collection Administration)
Make sure “Enable SharePoint Designer” is checked and click OK
Project web app template issue
Log in to a SharePoint server and go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\16\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates\PWA\XML
Open the ONET XML file in a text editor like NotePad
Search for “webdesign” (Ctrl+F to open search) and delete the following property:
DisableWebDesignFeatures="wdfeditpages"
Perform an IIS reset (run SharePoint management shell as administrator)
You may need to repeat these steps on multiple servers if you have multiple web front end servers. You can just copy the ONET file and overwrite the same file on the other servers in the same location. Don’t forget to do an IIS reset afterward on each.
Close and re-open your Project Web App site in SharePoint Designer and you should now be able to edit as you do with other sites.
Want to make your “search everything” really search everything? Add bing results to your SharePoint search results. You can do this as a result block (added to your results column) or as a separate results column as seen in the example at the bottom of this post.
Bing supports OpenSearch protocol while Google does not. This allows us to utilize Bing’s search engine from within our SharePoint environments (server or online). If you’re using SharePoint Server (on-prem), you’ll need to provide a proxy server for crawling and federation in central admin –> search administration.
The rest of the steps are the same for either online or on-prem:
Create result source
Create query rule
And you can do a similar process for a single site collection (through site collection settings) but I’ll be demonstrating this through central admin (for all site collections).
Create result source
From central admin –> search administration, click on “Result sources” under “Queries and Results”
Click “New Result Source”
Set the settings as follows, pasting https://www.bing.com/search?q={searchTerms}&format=rss&Market=en-us for the Source URL.
Leave credentials as “anonymous” and click “Save”
Create query rule
Click on “Query Rules” from the left nav in Search Administration
Set context to “Local SharePoint Results” and click “New Query Rule”
Name it “Bing Query Rule” and click “Remove Condition” since we want Bing to be included in every query
Click “Add Result Block” and set as follows:
Optional settings:
You can set the “context” settings to apply this rule to ALL result sources, or just to the Local SharePoint Results (default)
You can edit the result block so that a “more” link appears. Link it to https://www.bing.com/search?q={subjectTerms} to allow users to leave SharePoint and see even more results from Bing
Choose whether you want the “Bing results” block to appear at the top of SharePoint results or ranked. I recommend ranked if you’re only wishing to supplement your search for the occasional user who thinks SharePoint search is internet search.
Implementation
There are too many ways to implement this new result source to share here, but use your imagination. Each “search results” web part can be configured to use or ignore query rules.
In this example, we’re using query rules and promoting the top two bing results to the top of our SharePoint results with a “more” link that would take us out to Bing. This method requires the result source and query rule.
In this example, we’ve created a third column on our search results page that shows the top Bing results alongside our top SharePoint results. You don’t need a query rule for this, just the added result source and a separate web part.
So finally “Search everything” can really “search everything.”
