Category: administration

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:

1. Create a mapped property for user profiles
2. Use the new property at least once
   • Start a full crawl of people source
3. Create a managed property mapped to your new user property
   • Start a full crawl of site source
4. Edit the query on the people search results page
5. (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 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.

Start a full crawl of your people content source.

3. Create a managed property mapped to your new user property

Once the crawl is complete, go back to Central Admin home and select “Manage service applications.”

Select “Search service application”

Select “Search schema” from the left under “Queries and Results”

Select “New managed property”

Name it RemoveFromPeopleSearch and check “Queryable” and “Retrievable”

Scroll down and click “Add a mapping,” search for “remove” and add our new user property.

Click OK

This time, start a full crawl of your SITE content source.

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.”

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.

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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.

From central admin, click “Manage service applications” under “Application Management”

Select the “Search service application”

Select “Content sources” from the left under “Crawling”

Select the drop-down for the content source you’re crawling and choose either a full or incremental crawl.

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:

1. Create result source
2. 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

1. From central admin –> search administration, click on “Result sources” under “Queries and Results”
   
2. Click “New Result Source”
   
3. Set the settings as follows, pasting https://www.bing.com/search?q={searchTerms}&format=rss&Market=en-us for the Source URL.
   
4. Leave credentials as “anonymous” and click “Save”
   

Create query rule

1. Click on “Query Rules” from the left nav in Search Administration
2. Set context to “Local SharePoint Results” and click “New Query Rule”
   
3. Name it “Bing Query Rule” and click “Remove Condition” since we want Bing to be included in every query
   
4. 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.”

Health care or healthcare? Doctor or physician? Emergency room or ER?

No matter which terms, spellings or abbreviations a SharePoint search user uses, they’re searching for something specific. By utilizing a simple thesaurus, we can make sure that a user searching for “ER” also gets results that include “emergency room.”

How to create a thesaurus

Note: Not currently available in SharePoint online/O365. But should be supported in 2013/2016/2019. 

1. Create/open a new text file using Notepad
2. One the top line of the file type “Key,Synonym,Language”
3. On each following line, insert the initial search term (key) followed by the synonym SharePoint should also search for when the “key” is used. End each with an ISO 639-1 language code for your region (optional). Separate each component with a comma (no spaces) as seen below.
   
   1. In the previous example, you’ll notice we have to do each twice by switching the order so that whether a user searches “Information Technology” or “IT” they get results including both.
   2. If you’re including commonly misspelled words, you may wish not to provide the inverse/second option – just use the misspelling as the key with the correct word as the synonym. But if you’re afraid your content and results may also have the misspelling, I would include both (or fix the misspellings in your content).
      
   3. The thesaurus is not case-sensitive
   4. Don’t include quotations around multi-word phrases. The commas are all you need.
4. Save it to a server/network location such as \\Server\Documents\thesaurus.csv (include .csv at the end of the name) and make sure its encoding is set to UTF-8
   
   

What to include

If your industry is like most others, you have many acronyms – that’s a good starting place for building a thesaurus. Your thesaurus can contain considerations such as:

• Acronyms (ER/ED for emergency room/department)
• Abbreviations (Dr. and doctor)
• Common misspellings (absess and abscess)
• Formal and casual pairs (gastric and stomach)
• Synonyms (purchasing, requisition, ordering, supplies, etc.)
• Variations of a word (radiology, radiologist, radiologic, radiological)

Once you’ve compiled your basic thesaurus from going through the above suggestions, you should analyze the search reports provided by SharePoint to see what people have been actually searching but not finding. Then use those search terms to further enhance your thesaurus.

For example, when my governance committee analyzed search reports, we came up with people searching for “KU” (our local University and neighboring health system) and added “University of Kansas” to our thesaurus.

Import your completed thesaurus

Note: Each time you import, it overwrites the existing thesaurus. I recommend updating the same file you’ve created with new lines rather than recreating it multiple times. Also be sure to save the file in a place others can access and update in your absence. You won’t be able to export it later.

Repeat these steps each time you want to update the thesaurus:

Note: You must be a search service application administrator to import the thesaurus.

Log in to a SharePoint server and run PowerShell with the SharePoint snap-in or just use the SharePoint management shell (recommended). Either way, run as administrator.

Run the following cmdlets

$searchApp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication 
Import-SPEnterpriseSearchThesaurus -SearchApplication $searchApp -Filename <Full UNC Path>

If successful, you’ll see the following confirmation:

Test your work!

The changes should be almost instant, with no need to perform any crawls. Here’s an example of how in our search “med staff” now also searches for “medical staff”.