Think about the last time you used the search box on an internal system like your intranet on SharePoint. What was it like? Did you find what you were looking for in under 5 seconds, or even under a minute?

In most organizations, one of the most frequent complaints we hear about internal systems is about search. Statements like these are common:

• “Search doesn’t work – so I have to ask someone for help”

• “It’s hard to find information on [name your system here]”

• “I use search as a last resort”

• “Search doesn’t bring up what I expect”

• “I expect search to work like Google, but it doesn’t.”

If this is you – know that you are not alone! In fact, even the makers of SharePoint Search (AKA Microsoft) have challenges with search internally. In this article, Microsoft shares that:

“Five years ago employee satisfaction with finding information within the company was very low. it was the lowest rated it service among all those we surveyed about.”

Microsoft has very smart engineers working on search, just like Google. They’ve invested years building search tools within apps and for Bing. And they have the same challenges just like the rest of us. Even for Google – search doesn’t work by itself and not without thousands of hours and engineers working on it. Search is not a magical thing that just works instantly by itself, contrary to popular belief.

It’s almost a relief to know that search is a very tough problem for most organizations.

In this blog post, learn 5 ways to improve search on your SharePoint Online employee portal. This post describes the search experiences woven into Microsoft 365, and how to take it up a level if you are looking to take make search a truly useful tool for your employees.

1. First — organize your content

One of the reasons why search doesn’t work ‘like magic’ is because content is not tagged or organized properly. The better you manage content, then the better search works, and people can find content both through navigation and search.

In fact, with a strong information architecture and using content types, we observe that people know where things are, they can find the files and pages they need easily with the SharePoint navigation controls and don’t always need to rely on search.

One of the best things you can do is organize your content with content types and metadata as much as you possibly can. And don’t stick to the default “Document” content types! We recommend using more content types than less, and even though it takes upfront work to design and implement, you get better returns in the long run with people spending less time finding information.

This may reduce overall frustration with finding content on the intranet, and have indirect search benefits.

2. Use Hubs and a Home site for a modern search experience

If you haven’t already, update your employee portal to use Hubs and a Home site. This information architecture setup changes the search experience depending on where users are searching from, and the results are optimized depending on context.

Here’s what happens:

With a Home site, users get the modern Microsoft Search box that searches over all content in SharePoint. This is the search box you want to use for the best user experience.

👉 Read more from Microsoft about the differences between classic and modern SharePoint search.

From the SharePoint Home site, search looks over everything in SharePoint:

On a hub site, the default scope is set to “search across sites.” This searches all the sites associated to the hub. In this example for a Sales Hub, search displays results from all Sales sites (e.g. Proposals, Presentations, etc.) that are part of the Hub:

On an individual site that is associated to a hub — say for a Proposals site that is connected to the Sales Hub — search changes again to search just this one site:

In this case, the result set could be too narrow. To help the end-user, the result page from the individual associated Hub site has a breadcrumb to widen the search results if people can’t find what they are looking for:

And finally, what happens when a user is searching from Teams?

Teams provides an even broader result set than from the employee portal. It can search over Teams conversations, OneDrive files, Outlook and SharePoint content:

The Teams search results also provide a suggestion to narrow the search if the content is found in the employee portal – so having a Home site setup can help with this experience.

To recap, the scope the search box uses depends on the type of site and where the user is:

• Home sites search over all content.

• Hub sites search over all sites in the hub.

• Regular sites and associated hub sites search over the current site.

• Document library or list searches over the individual library/list.

• Teams searches a much broader set of content over chats, OneDrive and sites.

Make sure you have Home and Hub sites setup in a way that is logical to users so that they get the most intuitive search experience depending on context.

3. Setup search bookmarks

One size doesn’t always fit all for search, as organizations have different repositories and organization schemes.

Bookmarks can help direct people to the right places, especially for content that is outside of SharePoint Online, or the main employee portal Hub.

As an example, Microsoft significantly improved the search experience internally by taking the time to setup 1200(!) bookmarks:

[Bookmarks] are clicked on in 45% of all searches and significantly shortens the duration of a search session. We currently have ~1200 bookmarks making for quick discovery of the most commonly searched for content and tools around the company.

From: Making Search Better Within Microsoft - Microsoft Community Hub

You might not need that many but starting with even the top 100 bookmarks will curb many frustrations that people have with search results. Here is an example of the bookmark displaying at the top of a Home site search:

To make it even easier to setup, Microsoft Search has a feature that reviews your SharePoint links behind-the-scenes and automatically recommends bookmarks for publishing. These can be published without review or published manually after an administrator reviews it.

Microsoft suggests that a Search administrator tunes bookmarks quarterly, which isn’t a huge time commitment. Since these are highly visible and you want to make sure you cover the top keywords, we recommend monthly or quarterly governance as well.  

4. Layer in metadata for specific scenarios

To tailor search for specific content, you can add in metadata or advanced search options to help people sort through the search results.

We do this for scenarios where people are searching over thousands or even millions of files such as policies, forms, council information, or other semi-structured and organized content.

In this example, when doing a search over council files, the search area provides options to narrow the results down by document type, meeting type and a few other metadata tags:

You can create a search-driven experience like this example by adding the PnP Modern Search Web Parts to a page. To use custom column values as metadata filters, those columns must be Site Columns (usually included in Content Types) and mapped to Managed Properties. We have done this for dozens of projects, so reach out if you need a hand.

Another option for using metadata to assist with searching is Microsoft Syntex. Microsoft Syntex (which requires additional licenses) also provides advanced metadata search for content in a document library:

In summary — if you have content that could benefit from advanced search through metadata, we recommend taking the time to add metadata to that content based on an understanding of how users lookup and find content, and then designing a search experience that optimizes for how people use that metadata.

5. Search a knowledge base with Viva Topics

The last way we recommend improving search is to use Viva Topics for your organization’s knowledge base. Topics display in various places in Microsoft 365 such as SharePoint pages, Yammer and Outlook, and also as Topic result cards in search results.

If a user searches for something that has a related topic, it will surface at the top of the search results:

The Viva Topics search result card shows:

• Topic title, definition and alternate names/acronyms

• Related people

• Related content that could be files, pages or sites

Note: if you have both a bookmark and Viva Topic that could be displayed in results, the bookmark will appear instead of the topic.

If you’re going to make an investment into the Viva Suite, Viva Topics is a great way to integrate an employee knowledge base into search.

Read more

We hope these ideas help you optimize SharePoint search – or motivate you to keep an ongoing practice of reviewing and improving search.  Take it step by step, and over the long run your SharePoint search will see improvements. Here are a few helpful links to learn more:

• Setting up SharePoint Online bookmarks: Manage bookmarks | Microsoft Learn

• Learn how Microsoft manages search internally: Generating great results: Administering search at Microsoft

• For getting started with Microsoft Search APIs, and customization and extensibility samples, visit Microsoft Search on GitHub

Reach out if you need a hand improving your employee portal with a great search experience. We’d love to help!