Using a search query rule to promote an item in search results

Search indexers use complex algorithms to determine the order in which items should return in a search query. The factors include the number of times an item is linked to by other pages or items, the frequency of a keyword in the item, and the author of the item. As a result, it is not uncommon for items that are very important, but only use a particular keyword once or twice, to not appear at the top of the search results. For instance, a human resources site may have a number of blog posts and announcements related to retirement accounts. In addition, the site may have a document simply named Retirement Account Enrollment. When searching for information about retirement accounts, users may see results for the announcements and blog posts ahead of the enrollment document.

When the most important item, the enrollment document, doesn't return at the top of the search results, users may never find the item. To alleviate this, we can manually instruct SharePoint to display certain results first using query rules. This allows the site administrators of the human resources site to ensure users can easily find the enrollment document.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to create a search query rule:

  1. Navigate to our search center in your preferred web browser.
  2. Select Site settings from the Settings menu.
  3. Select Query Rules from the Search section as shown in the following screenshot:
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  4. Select the Documents (System) results source from the drop-down menu as shown in the following screenshot:
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  5. Select New Query Rule as shown in the following screenshot:
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  6. Provide a name for the query rule.
  7. In the Query Conditions section, select Query Matches Keyword Exactly and enter the keywords to match the query. The keywords are separated with semicolons.
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  8. Under Actions, click on Add Promoted Result.
  9. Enter a title, URL, and description for the promoted result in the Title, URL, and Description fields. This information will be displayed in the search results.
    How to do it…
  10. Click on Save to add the promoted result.
  11. Click on Save to save the query rule.

How it works…

Search query rules are used as a factor in the complex algorithms used by the SharePoint search service. Using query rules allows the site administrator to modify the positioning or importance of certain content that might otherwise be considered as less important by the search algorithm.

See also

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