SharePoint Search Tips and TricksPower User Search in SharePoint 2013

Joel OlesonDirector Enterprise Search Strategy

BA Insight@joeloleson

http://collabshow.com

Microsoft’s go-to ISV for Enterprise Search

Focused on Search and SharePoint since 2004

Search Industry Leader

About Joel Oleson• Director of Search

Strategy, BA Insight• First SharePoint admin• Top social media

influencer

Who Am I?

Passionate About• Search• SharePoint • Search-based

applications• Community• Travel

Connect@joeloleson

CollabShow.com

TravelingEpic.com

• End User Search Tips for SharePoint

• Building the Business Case for Enterprise Search

• Real World Value in SharePoint Search Case Studies

• Wrap up and Q&A

Agenda

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“We live in the age of Data Explosion, Big Data is our reality and Findability is the key competitive advantage any leading organization will have…

SharePoint Algorithm

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Enterprise search projects often fail because they do not meet users’ expectations and do not deliver a remarkable user experience.

Consumer search experience sets a high bar for search user experience

Killer Apps are Search Apps

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71% percent of Company executives say Search is VITAL or Essential to their day to day business…

Why do only 18% have cross repository search capabilities?

- AIIM 2014 Findability Survey

• Word, Words vs. Phrase

• Boolean

• Inclusion and Exclusion

• Proximity

Search Tips

• Free Text Queries–Word

–Multi word (default will AND words)

–Phrase (in quotes)

Search User Tips

• AND (Require) Narrow your search results. – mice AND men

• OR (Include) Expand your search Results– Mice OR Men

• NOT (Exclude)– mice NOT cats

• Case sensitivity Matters - Boolean operators must be capitalized!

Boolean

• “+” includes content that match the inclusion (same as AND)

• “-” excludes content that match the inclusion (same as NOT)

• Whitespace matters. Be sure to use quotes for phrases– -john smith is not the same as –”john smith”

Inclusion and Exclusion Operators

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• Proximity: NEAR where words are near each other

• Mice NEAR men

• Syntax– NEAR: <expression> NEAR(n=4) <expression>

– Mice NEAR(n=4) Men

• ONEAR: Preserves word order – <expression> ONEAR(n=4) <expression>

– Mice ONEAR(n=4) Men

Proximity

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• Use parenthesis to explicitly indicate the order of computation for KQL queries

• Combine different parts of a keyword query by using the opening parenthesis character "(" and closing parenthesis character ")".

• Each opening parenthesis "(" must have a matching closing parenthesis ")“

• A white space before or after a parenthesis does not affect the query.

Parenthesis: Building Complex Queries

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• KQL is on by default, but FQL Fast Query Language is not.

o (mice AND men) OR (cats NOT dogs)

• Case in terms doesn’t matter

• (UX OR user-experience OR “user experience”) AND “SharePoint 2013”

• (warehouse OR warehousing OR san OR nas OR storage)

• (.Net AND (VS OR “Visual Studio”) AND (VB or “Visual Basic” OR VB.net) AND (C# or C#.net ) AND “SQL Server”) NOT (designer OR “IT Pro”)

• cto OR “chief technical officer” OR “cio” OR “chief information officer” OR vp OR “vice president” OR svp OR “senior vice president”

KQL – Keyword Query Language

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• A KQL query consists of one or more of the following elements:

• Free text-keywords—words or phrases

• Property restrictions

• You can combine KQL query elements with one or more of the available operators

KQL – Keyword Query Language

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• Social media

• Social AND Media

• “Social Media”

• Social NEAR media

Quiz… What is the difference

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• Which ones are the same?

A. Dogs or Cats

B. dogs or cats

C. dogs OR cats

Quiz

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• If you are using SharePoint Foundation, underscores are NOT a valid word breaker Sundance_Film_Festival.docx and you search for the word Film, you will not find your document.

• All other versions of SharePoint, underscores ARE a valid word breaker - Sundance_Film_Festival.docx search Sundance, Film or Festival and get document.

Sue Hanley – http://www.networkworld.com/article/2222853/microsoft-subnet/10-essential-sharepoint-search-hints.html

Dashes, Underscores or Spaces…

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• File names and titles are very important metadata attributes. By default, SharePoint search results prominently feature the Title of a document and is almost Top for Rank.

• If Title is blank, results feature the file name

• Do NOT "smush" words together without a separator in file names or titles for documents. If you do, the search engine won't recognize the separate words.

Meaningful Titles, Folders, Sites & File Names

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• The * Star or Astrisk can be used to expand your search or for unknown spelling

– "micro*" finds documents that contain "Microsoft" or "microchip"

– Use on last term. Don’t use * at the beginning of a search query *soft will NOT return Microsoft. KQL queries don’t support suffix matching.

– Combine with phrasing for powerful search

o Ex. “john de*” is better than John De*

• Stemming & Wildcard is on by default in 2013, but not turned on in 2010.

• Default Search sorted by Relevancy

Wild Card Search

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If the product can’t be found, does the product exist? If the feature can’t be found, does the feature exist?

34 percent of the sites don’t return useful results when users search for a model number or misspell just a single character in the product title.”- 2014 study by Baynard Institute

• You don’t know how to spell the last name…

• You don’t know how to spell the first name…

Quiz…

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• Property Search– author:"William Zuckermann“

– Filetype:pptx

– filename:”search”

– title:”search”

• Property Operators :=<>..

• Keyword Query Language (KQL) to enter advanced queries directly in the search box, like this: ("wind farms" OR "solar panels") AND (title:"innovations" OR title:"technologies")

Search Tips Cont.

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Is Metadata more powerful than content?

Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the NSA, said last year: "Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody's life. If you have enough metadata, you don't really need content."

• = (equal) Returns search results where the property value is equal to the value specified in the property restriction.

• : (colon) matches individual terms in the property value that is stored in the full-text index

• < less than >greater than when used with date based operators

• .. Elipse example A..B where they fall between values

Property Operators

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author: "John Smith" author :"John Smith" author : "John Smith"

What’s wrong? What will happen?

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• Property can be retrieved using KQL when the Managed Property Keyword Retrievable property is set to true for a managed property.

• Configure your Managed Property to include content from crawled properties.

• company:"Adventure Works"

Query Custom Managed Properties

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• What is the difference between these searches?

• title:sharepoint search strategy

• title=sharepoint search strategy

• title=“sharepoint search strategy”

• title:“sharepoint search strategy”

• Title:”SharePoint Search*”

• Title:sharepoint title:strategy

Quiz

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• Is anything wrong with this?

• Filetype:xls AND budget

• Filetype:ppt and “search strategy”

• SharePoint will auto OR for same property

• Author:Mark Author:Cindy

• Plus and Minus work, but don’t use them together…

• Character length limit: 2,048 

Gotchas

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• Advanced parameters typically they're not used.– The cb parameter refers to constant boost

– The stdb parameter refers to standard deviation boost

– The rb parameter refers to range boost. This factor is multiplied with the range of rank values in the results set

– The pb parameter refers to percentage boost. This factor is multiplied with the item's own rank compared to the minimum value in the corpus.

• All items containing the term "animals", and boosts dynamic rank for cats over dogs

• (animals XRANK(cb=100) dogs) XRANK(cb=200) cats

XRANK

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Searches Need to be Precise for Best Results

“sales forecast” OR (“sales“ NEAR “forecast”) AND (author:”William Zuckermann") AND (format:”XLS”) OR (format:”XLSX”)

Give me a search box and I will formulate my own query to find it

Users with a combination of high technical / high domain expertisewill achieve the best search results.

search

The New Role of Taxonomy – Noise Reduction

Eliminate Noise from Queries

• SharePoint Enterprise search is the right investment

• Search is the killer app…

• Know your users – Context is everything

• You MUST have a metadata strategy

• UX including visual refinement is essential

Key Takeaways

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Let’s make Search the next enterprise killer app.

Questions!

Joel.Oleson@bainsight.com@joeloleson

• SharePoint Search Help

http://office.microsoft.com/client/15/help/home?Shownav=true&lcid=1033&ns=SPOSTANDARD&helpID=SearchTips&ver=16

• Keyword Query Language (KQL) Syntax Reference

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee558911(v=office.15).aspx

• Property Restriction Keyword Queries

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff394509(v=office.14).aspx

• Building Search Queries in SharePoint 2013

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163973(v=office.15).aspx

• Plan End User Search Experience

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263089.aspx

• Tips for Effective Queries

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/tips-for-effective-searches-HA010241114.aspx#BMha10241114_sectipsonpropertiesinsearc

Search Tips References

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Questions!

Contact me...Joel.Oleson@bainsight.com@joeloleson