Re: B Series Intranet Search And Settings
Leigha Keplinger
When users search on a site, results can come from many places such as columns, libraries, and pages. A site owner can change search settings to decide whether content is allowed to appear in search results. Permissions on content also affect whether users are allowed to see the content in search results. A good understanding of how permissions and search settings work can help you ensure that users can see the right documents and sites in the search results.
As a site owner, you can use settings to control whether content can appear in search results. Content is stored in many places including sites, lists, libraries, Web Parts, and columns. By default, most content contained in a site, list, library, Web Part page, or column will be crawled and added to the search index. What's in the search index decides what content can appear in search results both in the classic and modern search experiences. The permissions that are set on items, lists, libraries, sites, and so forth, also affect whether users can see the content in search results.
Site owners and site collection administrators can choose whether content can appear in search results. By default, the content of a site can appear in search results. If a site owner or site collection administrator specifies that the content from a particular site can't appear in search results, then the other search results settings such as those for lists, libraries, ASPX pages, and columns set on that site wouldn't have any effect.
Similarly, if a site owner or site collection administrator prevents list or library content from appearing in search results, then excluding columns wouldn't have any effect. It's important to know what settings are inherited from higher levels in order to plan search effectively.
One of the responsibilities of a site owner is to control who has access to content. You can give some people permission to read and change content, allow others to only read content, and prevent others from viewing content entirely. In order to accommodate this flexibility, you use permissions groups, which are assigned specific permission levels. To allow users access to the site or to content on that site, a site owner assigns users to one or more security groups. By using permissions settings in conjunction with search results settings, the site owner can manage whether users can see content in search results.
As a Global Administrator or SharePoint Administrator, you can specify how search should behave for a classic site collection or a site. The shared Search Box at the top of most classic pages uses these search settings. Any settings you specify on site collection level applies to all sites within that site collection, unless you specify other settings for the site.
To change which search result page queries are sent to, in the section Which search results page should queries be sent to?, clear Use the same results page settings as my parent, and then select one of the following:
From an end-user perspective, the ideal search experience would be to type some keywords into the search box and immediately find what you were looking for on a neatly designed search results page. But as we all know, that is seldom the case on intranets. Instead, a more common scenario is that end-users rate the intranet search function as quite poor and that finding information this way is a struggle.
Within an intranet you will find sites, pages, documents, communities, people, processes, and several other types of content. Also, the content mentioned has been created or is being used in several different contexts such as team collaboration, official documentation, knowledge sharing conversations, personal blog posts and so forth. These dimensions of formats and contexts is one of the main reasons for why finding the information you are looking for using intranet search.
A great way of making intranet search even more accessible and bringing value to end-users, is to establish and provide search applications. Here we are referring to a setup of search function with defined capabilities and displayed in a certain context.
Our experience is that when moving the possibility to search from the top banner search box onto a web page, end-users find this type of application really helpful. So, we strongly recommend using search applications to improve the overall intranet search experience.
Federated search means searching in several data sources, and when used in an intranet context the term often refers to searching outside the intranet domain. Most modern intranet search engines will allow federated search and provide connectors to business systems.
If your intranet is based on, or tightly integrated with, Microsoft 365 you will have several options if you wish to include further data sources in your intranet search. Without any further license costs you can add on-premises file shares, on-premises SQL, Azure SQL, Salesforce, ServiceNow and several other common sources.
Finally, we need to emphasize that a good intranet search experience starts with taking good care of content. This includes the use of metadata that can be provided as filters and refiners or to deploy search categories.
The report states that Omnia delivers a fully-featured intranet with impressive performance and excellent user experience on all screens, from mobile to digital signage. The product has also received praise for strong search, navigation, and targeting capabilities, all important aspects of a well-used solution.
There is good news, however, as there are ways to improve intranet search and with some thoughtful planning and the adoption of important processes, intranet managers can provide users with much-improved intranet search experiences.
A report by KMWorld does a good job of explaining the complexity of enterprise information search - "Unlike Web search, enterprise search makes different demands on an information access platform: for better accuracy; security; more formats; more reporting tools; more language understanding; and better interaction design." Understanding the complicated nature of enterprise information is the first step in creating better intranet search experiences.
Interestingly, research attributes 62% of dissatisfaction with enterprise search to non-technical factors such as information quality and search literacy. This study sheds a light on some of the contingencies necessary for great intranet search, which brings us to the next question, what can we do to improve intranet search?
SharePoint features such as Tags and Metadata are necessary for enhancing the search experience. intranet content must be tagged effectively with metadata in order to efficiently surface in the search results. Thoughtful data organization and careful metadata and tagging strategies are essential for creating a valuable intranet and enhancing the overall search experience.
SharePoint provides the option to activate a continuous site crawl which helps to improve search speed by providing a more updated index but it consumes more power on the server. A balanced decision needs to be made with regards to site crawl settings to ensure that it works from both a server consumption and information retrieval perspective.
A robust approach to governance is essential for creating a sustainable SharePoint intranet that grows and develops in tandem with the organization rather than becoming outdated and obsolete soon after intranet go-live. A Governance team should be set up with responsibility for ensuring that only up to date information is kept on the intranet. A reliable Governance structure ensures that information on the intranet is relevant and organized appropriately, thus enhancing search results.
Content audits are key for managing intranet content and should be conducted at regular intervals. A content audit gives the intranet team an overview of the content on the intranet and helps them to determine if and when they need to keep, rewrite or delete existing content. Again, this exercise helps to ensure that only necessary, up-to-date content exists on the intranet rendering better search results for users.
Content publishing rules are important to encourage content authors to optimally publish content for search. Information such as content structure best practice and including keywords on intranet page names and also in the summaries can increase the findability of intranet information.
Intranet teams should regularly review the intranet search logs to determine the most popular searches and to analyze if the content is easily found. Perhaps popular sites and pages could be further optimized to speed up the time it takes users to find them. Including keywords and appropriately tagging content can make a huge difference. Search logs provide great insight into what users are searching for and can provide quick access to key intranet search issues.
Predictive type-ahead is a great way of enhancing a users' intranet search experience. This innovative search tactic predicts what a user is searching for and provides a list of the most relevant results fast.
By changing the security settings, you can customize how Internet Explorer helps protect your PC from potentially harmful or malicious web content. Internet Explorer automatically assigns all websites to a security zone: Internet, Local intranet, Trusted sites, or Restricted sites. Each zone has a different default security level that determines what kind of content can be blocked for that site. Depending on the security level of a site, some content can be blocked until you choose to allow it, ActiveX controls might not run automatically, or you might see warning prompts on certain sites. You can customize the settings for each zone to decide how much protection you do or don't want.
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