In this article I explore how administrators can troubleshoot common issues why SharePoint’s search may not be working. Then we will also look at ways you can improve the overall experience for the user.
This guide is for Microsoft 365 instances of SharePoint, also called SharePoint Online. Maybe as an admin you just migrated from SharePoint 2016, or you’re a seasoned pro but are running out of ideas.
Problem 1: Missing results
It’s common that users are unable to find specific documents that they know have been added to SharePoint. Even if you don’t have an active report of a user, it’s a good idea to know typical reasons so you could proactively keep an eye out for them.
Troubleshoot issue 1: Search is disabled
Some types of SharePoint sites have a Site settings menu accessible from the settings ⚙️ icon.
Newer Communication or Team sites don’t have this menu anymore, but instead you can click on Site information and then select View all site settings
In there is a setting named Search and Offline Availability where the site content could be accidentally excluded from search results. If you find the radio button to be on No just flip it over to Yes, and then click Reindex site. Even if the radio button was already set to Yes, requesting a manual reindex of a site can’t hurt so go ahead and click it anyways.
If you go to the Documents page within your SharePoint site there is another indexing switch that may be inadvertently disabled. Click on the Documents page and then on the settings icon again. Select Library settings, followed by Advanced settings.
On that page make sure that Allow items from this document library to appear in search results? is set to Yes. If you have some advanced filter views, these might actually hide some documents from users, so you might want to set Index Non-Default Views to Yes, too. After that click Reindex Document Library (or Reindex List) to make your changes become effective in the search index.
If the radio button was already set to Yes, it’s always a good idea to request a manual re-crawl of the page regardless.
Troubleshoot issue 2: Inconsistent results
You may have a number of users who report SharePoint’s Search isn’t working, as they cannot find a document despite using the exact title as their search query. If documents are found inconsistently between different users, this may point towards an issue with permissions. First of all check that the user in question is actually a member of the site.
Now, even if your users are correctly labelled to be a Member, the Member role might have incorrect permission to some of your folders. So go to Documents and select an affected folder. Now click on the little i icon to reveal the folder details and click on Manage access.
On the next page make sure your Member role has at least Can view permission. If it doesn’t click on Advanced and add that role back in.
Troubleshoot issue 3: One particular document isn’t being found
Many large organizations use some kind of versioning where v1 of a document remains visible in search, even while dot versions like v1.3.1 are being worked on by the respective team. (Learn more about versioning in SharePoint) If you are looking for a minor version of a document (perhaps since you’re contributing to it) bear in mind that it isn’t getting indexed until v2 is finalized and published.
If that isn’t the case but you just can’t find a specific, single document in SharePoint, and no one else can find it either, then it could need checking in or approving. Does the document show a little red arrow icon next to the title in SharePoint?
If it does, that means it has been Checked out which means an editor wanted to reserve this document as they are currently changing it and want to avoid accidental conflicts, in case someone else tried to change the document in the meantime.
If you know it’s safe to check the document back in, click the 3-dots menu and select More → Check in or Discard check out.
Although retired for new SharePoints, you might still have a pending workflow attached to a document. This mean it hasn’t been approved for public users to view it, and hence isn’t in the search index.
To check whether any documents are pending approval, go to the settings icon and then navigate to Library settings → Workflow Settings. If you have any pending workflows they would show under Workflows in progress.
Troubleshoot issue 4: Query choice
Going back to some basics for just a moment. If your SharePoint search is not working and you’re missing results, and none of the above issues applied to your case, then perhaps consider if you’re using the best search query. Common mistakes users make are:
- Inadvertently using the “wrong” search box, which may only looks for results within Yammer, Teams, Stream or other apps. Many of these aren’t searching across Microsoft 365, so if you suspect that’s what you’re user may have done, ask them for a screenshot to verify they’re using the “real” SharePoint search at the top of the screen.
- Try fewer or more general search terms, for example you could try “minutes” instead of “meeting minutes”, or instead of “absence policy” you could try “HR policies”
- Try a * wildcard character at the end of a word. For example if you enter com* you will get results for compliance or computer. There is also a slew of specialized syntax you can use to aid your search (though this is mostly useful to filter when there are too many results).
More troubleshooting
These are all the typical reasons why documents might seemingly inexplicably be missing and SharePoint search may appear not to be working. Remember, if you have SharePoint 2016 or other on-premises versions and your search doesn’t work, there may be other reasons not covered in here.
If you weren’t able to resolve your issue with the above steps, and your SharePoint search still isn’t working, then this might be a good point in time to open a case with Microsoft. You’re a paying customer after all.
Problem 2: Bad user experience
For most of its life SharePoint’s search has been a mixed bag in terms of its UI. This has gotten to a point where Microsoft has thrown in the towel and made an all-new search for SharePoint online. This is a lot easier to use, at the expense of being almost entirely bereft of meaningful ways to refine results.
For small organizations this may be enough, but larger organizations are left wanting for more. Microsoft knows search needs vary widely between their small and enterprise tenants. So what are larger organizations supposed to do?
Microsoft launched an open-source SharePoint search add-on named PnP Modern Search. This is a pretty straightforward add-in that gives you new, and more flexible, web parts for making a better search page yourself.
Basically you would create your own search page with these built-in web parts. And then you reroute the standard SharePoint search bar at the top, to direct users to this new, dedicated page for their results.
This is done in the SharePoint admin center by navigating to More features → Search → Search Center Settings and then changing the URL to your new page.
Here are the most popular modifications admins make with PnP Modern Search:
Solution 1: Enable more search filters
The lack of these in standard SharePoint search obviously makes Modern Search so appealing. After adding the Search filters web part you can add two types of tag or date-range pickers to your searches which will then filter the displayed results.
Solution 2: Custom search suggestions
SharePoint’s search has suggestions but they aren’t configurable. If you have dedicated applications or 3rd party web parts in SharePoint, they don’t typically get crawled for suggestions.
But Modern Search addresses this by letting you configure custom suggestion providers that you can point against any data source.
Solution 3: Highly specific searches
Aside from replacing your global SharePoint search, PnP Modern Search also lets you make dedicated searches for specific verticals in your organization. For example, say you’re a law firm and you want a specific case law search that uses more filters and metadata (compared to the more general) global search.
While you can create your own search verticals in SharePoint online, these won’t work in conjunction with the customizable sources or filters from Modern Search. Say in our example, we wanted to have filters that let you choose between cases from District or Supreme Courts. By using Modern Searches built-in Search Verticals web part, you can freely design your new search tab to both narrow the results and let users make further refinements.
Problem 3: Boring results
Ask anyone in this industry what users want, and the answer always is “I just want it to work like Google”. What many users mean by that is, they want:
- suggestions as they type
- search to understand complete sentences
- results that “jump” at you, presented in Card-like snippets (which Google does so well)
- works on mobile devices as well as on desktops
Surely, if something, that makes SharePoint search this awesome, existed you’d have heard of it already, right?
Well, buckle up and stow your tray table cause… such a product actually exists. And it’s free.
There is an add-on to Modern Search (basically an add-on for an add-on, so to speak) called Answer Cards that hooks straight into your PnP search web parts. This one will give you results also, but they’re in the shape on an Adaptive Card. That’s a standard created by Microsoft and it’s pretty easy to pick up, even for non-developers.
After you got the web part from App Source (no manual install necessary for this one), you basically click either the Add new Answer Card or Add more QnA knowledge to bring up an Adaptive Card designer where you can create your Card.
There are some fancy templates you could use as a starting point. Once you’ve made one, you can search for it in the web part by title, or training phrases that can be added in the designer.
Initially, the web part displays a search bar, but by clicking on the Use with PnP Modern Search toggle you can switch it into a mode that would make it receive its inputs from PnP – Search Box. If you sandwich this web part in-between your other PnP web parts you can easily create your own Google-esque SharePoint search.
Problem 4: Get results from other apps
One of the most obvious improvements you can make to a SharePoint search is widen its horizons to include more sources. Since 2019, SharePoint’s search is based on Microsoft Search (made by the Bing team no less) which means it now encompasses SharePoint, Outlook and OneDrive for Business out of the box. The previous SharePoint search didn’t even include these. But there are options to bring in even more data sources that you should consider:
Idea #1: Take advantage of Microsoft Search
This new Microsoft Search allows you to connect outside cloud apps to your SharePoint search using Microsoft Graph Connectors. Basically that’s a push service where other applications can add their own records to the search index in SharePoint.
And there’s quite an illustrious number of services to choose from: Salesforce, Alfresco, Atlassian, GoogleDrive, IBM Connections, SAP, Slack, just to name a few…
To set up a Connector go to the Admin center → Settings → Search & intelligence → Connectors → Add.
At the time of writing (February ’22) there weren’t that many services to choose from yet, but nevertheless you may be interested to keep an eye on this.
Idea #2: Use tools provided by PnP Modern Search
Modern Search can also be extended to include your own data sources. As their docs detail, this would entail creating the data source logic first, and then registering it for discovery. Even though there are no built-in data sources you can start off with, at least they offer you the option to add a “search suggestion provider” that draws from the same data, which is neat.
Idea #3: Use the Answer Cards designer again
The Adaptive Card designer from the Answer Cards web part, whether it’s running with PnP or not, can actually combine the Card’s layout with live data it pulls from an API. And that is kind of a secret weapon, as there are literally dozens of baked in apps listed in the directory already, including ServiceNow, Salesforce, Zendesk, Jira, and many others.
Problem 5: Missing results from other Microsoft products
This should have perhaps been listed before problem #4. SharePoint’s search actually has a huge coverage gap when it comes to 1st party, Microsoft-owned data. There is a longer read, but in a nutshell, SharePoint doesn’t search in Teams, Teams searches in your OneDrive but it can’t search apps within Teams. It’s really a fundamental problem.
This is perplexing to me because with Microsoft Search they promised to address this exact problem. That was 2019, it’s now *checks* 2023. Where are the results?
I’ll let you in on a little secret: You can use Microsoft’s super-duper all-encompassing search today. It’s been available for months, actually.
Remember how I said above that Microsoft Search is made by the Bing team? That’s exactly right, head over to Bing right now and you should see a Work tab that shows you all your files, SharePoint sites, Teams messages, colleagues, etc. in one view.
Just make sure you’re logged in with your work or school account. If you haven’t tried it yet, definitely check it out. Although a little unconventional, Bing’s Work tab is certainly something that could come in handy for you or your users. At least until Microsoft has decided how to port this experience over into the real SharePoint.
~
I hope this blogpost was able to fix your most common SharePoint issues, as well as address some long-standing quirks of SharePoint. Did I miss anything? Is there a trick to improving SharePoint search you’d like to share? Leave your comments below.
