The first step toward using a Search Center is creating one. You create a Search Center as you would any other site or subsite; you start by creating a new site from a template. You can add a Search Center as a subsite directly under one of your current sites, or your administrator can create it as a stand-alone site collection.

After you have created a Search Center, you’ll probably want to try it out for the first time. From the Home page of your newly created Search Center, you’ll be able to enter a simple, free-text query similar to that which you might use with an online search provider such as Bing.com.

Search from a Search Center

1. From the root site that contains your Search Center, click the Settings button (the small gear icon next to the name of the logged-on user) and then, on the menu that appears, click the Site Contents link.

   

2. On the Site Contents page, scroll down to the Subsites section and click the link for your Search Center (in this example, it’s Basic Search Center).

   

3. On the Search Center page, in the search text box, enter your search terms.

4. Click the the Search button (the magnifying-glass icon) to perform the search.

   

Effective search techniques

If you’ve made use of search within a SharePoint 2013 Search Center, you’ve probably already noticed how similar the experience is to working with a search engine such as Bing or Google. Regardless, the blank search window can be daunting, particularly when you are trying to search for a file that is buried under a mountain of similar content. In this case, there are options you can use that will quickly help you isolate exactly the content you need to find quickly.

The expressions that you type into the search box in a SharePoint Search Center are referred to as the Keyword Query Language (KQL); however, this is simply a complex way of describing expressions that you can add to your queries to help you focus and further analyze relevant information.

Find content containing all keywords

The simplest method for refining your search if too many items are returned is to add additional keywords to the query. SharePoint 2013 lists the keywords that you originally used at the top of the search page so that you can quickly modify and extend your original query without having to retype it.

By default, each of the search terms that you enter are all required to appear in the matching documents, so if you type three separate words into the search interface, all three words must appear somewhere in the returned documents.

Tip

Your keywords are not required to appear in order or even together in the text. The only requirement is that each of the words must appear somewhere in the document or in the item properties.

Find content matching any of your keywords

Sometimes, in more complex queries, you want to include results that match one of two queries. In this case, you are really asking for one result “or” another, which requires the use of the OR keyword. Typically, when using the OR keyword, you will need to enclose multiterm expressions within parentheses to ensure that the query engine knows which terms to combine and how.

Tip

The OR operator can be combined with some of the other techniques in this section; thus, you can create very complex search operations that can include wildcards and phrases.

Caution

Unlike query terms, the OR keyword must be capitalized or it will be treated as an ordinary word to search.

Search on partial keywords

By default, SharePoint searches find only exact matches for the keywords that you enter in the search box. Sometimes, you might want to search for only part of a word because it might have multiple endings. In this case, you can add a special operator to the end your partial word to match all documents containing this partial word.

This operator is called the wildcard operator, and it is represented by an asterisk (*). You can simply add an asterisk to the end of any partial word, and the search engine will return all permutations that match the first part of the word.

Tip

Depending on your search configuration, searches in your site might already return results for similar words without requiring a wildcard. For example, many queries automatically return results for the plural forms of words, such as “documents” when you search on “document”. This is called word stemming, and it is configured by the search administrator.

Search for complete phrases

Unlike the wildcard operator, there might be time when you know an entire phrase that is used in your document and want to only return results where your keywords appear in the exact same order in the document. In this case, you can surround your entire search phrase in double quotes. Only documents containing the entire phrase as you have entered it will be returned.

Tip

This can be a very useful tool for finding documents on a SharePoint site for which you might only have a snippet of the document (for example, if you only have part of a printout). Simply enter most of a sentence within the quotes and your search results will be quite specific.

Tip

Quotes must appear in matched pairs, so make sure that you put quotes before and after your entire phrase.

Exclude keywords

Sometimes, you have too many search results, but you don’t have additional terms that you can use to refine. In this case, you might notice that your search results are being overwhelmed by a large number of documents that share an unwanted term. In this case, you can simply append a minus sign (–) to the beginning of any keyword or expression that you wish to exclude from the results.

Find nearby keywords

One of the more interesting search options is the NEAR operator, with which you can return results in which two words appear near one another. For example, you might be looking for documents where a company name appears near the word “proposal.” You could enter the search expression as follows:

proposal NEAR(n=4) contoso

In this case, you would find any document containing both “proposal” and “contoso,” but no more than four words appear between those keywords. You can enter any number between 1 and 8 to specify how far away the terms can appear in the matching documents.

Tip

The default spacing for SharePoint searches is a maximum of eight words between your two keywords. If you’re comfortable using the default, you can drop the (n=x) part of the query and just type proposal NEAR contoso.

Tip

As with other operators, you must capitalize all letters when you specify the NEAR operator.

After you’ve created a Search Center, you might want to ensure that users of your other sites use this Search Center instead of the default SharePoint 2013 search facility. You can configure the search box that appears at the top-level page of your site to redirect all searches to a specific Search Center. This way, you can better control the user search experience within your site.

Search Centers are not the only place where you can initiate searches in SharePoint 2013. After you have associated a Search Center with your site, you can access the Search Center results directly from the search dialog on your site’s Home page. Additionally, you can perform library-specific searches directly within a document library without having to navigate to the Search Center.

Search refinement makes it possible for users to continue to filter search results after an initial query. If you’ve ever tried searching online within an online shopping site, you have probably already used search refinement. For example, if you search for “television” at an online electronics store, you might be presented with search options specifying size ranges such as 21–24 inches or 25–32 inches. You might see other filters with which you can select between LCD and Plasma displays. SharePoint 2013 supports the same type of dynamic filtering within search results.

One of the most powerful options within search refinement is that you only see the most relevant filters based on the query results. An example of this is the Result type refinement that shows a list of the most commonly occurring types of content that appear in your search (for example, Microsoft Word documents, PDF files, webpages, and so on). If your search results only include a few types of documents, you will not see options to filter content types that don’t appear in your results. Instead, you might see a list of document authors. This saves time because only the most commonly occurring filters (within your query) are displayed.

SharePoint 2013 continues to extend the search refinement options provided in previous versions by adding additional refinement controls such as graphical date range controls and offering administrators extensive configuration options for presenting the most relevant filters to search users.

SharePoint 2013 offers a number of preview options within the search results view. For example, users can quickly preview Office documents via the Office Web Apps integration. The same is true for video results.

These features become very useful when you are trying to scroll through a large number of potentially relevant search results. Integrated preview makes it easy for you to quickly glance at a document or video and determine if you need to investigate further without opening or downloading the full version of the document.

With the abundance of search options currently available in the SharePoint 2013 Search Centers, you might not find yourself needing to use advanced search. The advanced search view is still available, however, and it splits the single text field that many users currently use into a collection of text fields.

Most of the options presented, such as the ability to include entire phrases or exclude keywords from search, can also be performed from standard search text boxes. This requires remembering special symbols (or using quotes to indicate phrases). Advanced search simplifies this process.

If you want to learn more about these query options from the standard query text field, read Effective search techniques.

Search alerts notify you as search results change over time. Perhaps you are interested in keeping track of all documents that contain the phrase “tax audit” within your site (why you’re interested in that is probably none of our business). In this case, you could generate a search alert that would email you a summary of any documents that are added or changed that match this search expression.

Search alerts do require the system to generate reports, so you are limited to receiving a daily or weekly summary of the changes that impact your search alerts. This does mean, however, that your email inbox won’t fill to overflowing with every small change that might be made to a site!

From within a Search Center, individual users can customize their search preferences and save these persistently. For example, users can enable or disable autosuggestion, which is a helper that completes your queries as you are writing them.

As with many new SharePoint options, you can enable or disable them if you find that they are a distraction. The primary benefit offered by the Search Center is to make it possible for users to self-administer their search preferences, without them having to talk to IT or your site administrators.

If you’ve created a SharePoint 2013 Search Center and have begun tailoring the search options of your sites, you’ve probably been asked the question of how to manipulate search results. Perhaps you have a regulatory need or you just need to ensure that certain keywords always prominently feature a single result at the top of the search results.

One example might be if you want to push HR policy documents that match specific keywords to the top of all searches. You might create a promoted search result for all searches that contain the terms “vacation policy.” This would give you the opportunity to feature the formal HR Vacation Policy document as the first hit for any of these queries, regardless of the other search terms or search preferences.

This can save your user community a great deal of time if used pervasively, or this could simply represent a quick fix to promote “hard to find” documents higher in your results. Above and beyond these settings, SharePoint offers a great deal of configuration options to tune and rank your search results to help push valuable content to the top of end-user searches.

In most configurations, SharePoint applies security to ensure that users only see search results that they are allowed to access. However, there are cases for which you don’t want to explicitly block access to documents, but you want to hide documents away from most users.

For example, you might have a new site containing informal content that is edited by a large number of users. In this case, you would not want to define a complex security model, but you might be concerned that some users would inadvertently access these pages and documents via search and think the information is finalized. In these scenarios, you can specify within SharePoint 2013 that certain site content should not be indexed, which reduces the possibility of users accidently finding these documents.

As with site content in SharePoint 2013, you might sometimes want to hide only a specific document library or list from search, ensuring that users do not inadvertently access files via search without realizing the content is not ready for use.

SharePoint 2013 search reads not only the content of documents and pages but also the metadata (site columns) defined on list items and documents. This includes the title of the document, its file name, and the author of the document, as well as other site columns associated with the document.

If you have certain metadata that you want to ensure isn’t picked up by the search engine within SharePoint, you can remove this information from the search index.

With all of the changes that you can make to the search configuration and directly to the Search Center associated with your site, you’ll be relieved to know that you don’t have to enter this configuration each and every time that you set up a site.

You can export your SharePoint 2013 search configuration from a single site and import it in another site. For example, if you set up a new Search Center, you could migrate all of the promoted search results that you previously entered on another site into your new site.

Using these management tools, you can apply your site changes consistently across additional sites and help enforce continuity between sites. Additionally, they ensure that the time that you spend setting up tailored search rules is more like a reusable investment that you can take advantage of for future sites.