SharePoint Search: Find What You Need Instantly

Office 365 guides - SharePoint

SharePoint Search: Find What You Need Instantly

What you’ll find in this article

• What SharePoint Search is

• What types of search experience exist

• What the limits of this feature are

The SharePoint search engine indexes every site, page, list, library, folder, and file in SharePoint Online.

The software searches the full text of documents and their metadata.

This metadata includes any keywords or taxonomies set up on your intranet.

Search only returns indexed results, meaning only results the system has already recorded beforehand.

To get the most out of the platform’s search feature, you need to know how and where to search.

You can get better results by searching only within a specific site or a limited library, instead of automatically searching across every area of the system.

If you already know which section contains the file you’re looking for, you can find what you need in an instant, even with a quick scan.

The search will be limited to that specific section, and every other area of the intranet will be excluded.

SharePoint Search in Microsoft 365 offers two types of search experience: classic and modern.

Both search modes are active by default.

The type of search experience users see also changes depending on where the search happens:

• Modern search: the search box shows up on the homepage, communication sites, and SharePoint and hub sites.

• Classic search: the classic search box shows up on publishing sites, traditional team sites, and the search center.

The classic search experience will likely be phased out in the future, so keep that in mind when deciding how to manage your intranet or team sites.

What file types are indexed?

Practically any file type you’d normally work with.

Every file created either with Office desktop apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote) or through the browser, zip files, PDFs, images, and many others.

PDF files are indexed as long as they contain a text layer, of course.

Can you customize the results page?

Yes! And now, with the platform’s modern sites, you can do it very easily.

You can customize search results to match your intranet’s look, add custom filters, and change how each individual result is displayed.

What if it doesn’t work?

This can happen for a number of reasons, but remember: by default, it searches across all the content of your intranet or specific team sites.

If employees are looking for information that isn’t written inside a document, a list, or a page, they won’t find anything.

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Limits of the SharePoint search engine

The feature has a few limits you should know about. There are two types that apply to every SharePoint Online plan:

• “Boundary” limits mark a hard cap that can’t be exceeded.

• “Supported” limits, on the other hand, indicate a “recommended” limit; this means it’s an advisory threshold, and going past it could lead to unexpected issues or a significant drop in performance.

Most limits are boundary limits. The most important ones are:

• Indexable document size: you can index a document’s content if it’s smaller than 150 MB. Anything beyond that can’t be indexed. The limit is 150 MB for every document.

• Amount of content parsed: search stops analyzing an item after processing a maximum of 2 million characters. Parsing happens within 30 seconds per item. If an item is only partially processed, it can’t be fully processed and therefore can’t be indexed.

• Characters processed by the word breaker: search splits content into individual words (tokens). The system can produce a maximum of 1,000,000 characters per item, within a maximum of 30 seconds. Content that falls outside these limits isn’t processed.

• Token size: search can index tokens of any length, but the word breaker used to produce tokens may limit token length. Token size depends on the word breaker, which in turn depends on the language used.

• Number of custom dictionary entries: the number of terms allowed in inclusion and exclusion dictionaries used to correct spelling mistakes in queries is limited to 5,000 terms per user.

See all the details in Microsoft’s documentation.

Among the most important supported limits, we can include:

• Managed property mapping: crawled properties can be mapped to managed properties. The limit for managed properties is 100.

• Authoritative pages: the recommendation is to use as few second- and third-level pages as possible. The limit is one top-level page per tenant.

With this feature, you’ll be able to save time thanks to faster, more effective searches.

Spend less time looking for the documents you need or the people you want to reach, save money, and become more productive.

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