SharePoint 2013 search improvements

1. What’s Available in
SharePoint 2013 Search?

2. Search
• New Search
architecture with one
unified search
• Personalized search
results based on
search history
• Rich contextual
previews
• Continuous crawling
for O365 information

3. SharePoint 2013 Search
• I wish we could customize search results by the type of
content that is returned.
– Done!
• When someone searches for something, it would be nice
to trigger another search for them and return those
results.
– Done!

4. UI Improvements
• Hover Panel
• Deep Refiners
• Promoted Results
• Result Blocks

5. Relevance Improvements
Hover Panel
• Managed Metadata
• Actions

6. Relevance Improvements
Managed Metadata
• Refiners

7. Relevance Improvements
Query
Suggestions
Result
Blocks

8. Relevance Improvements
• Promoted Results

9. Relevance Improvements
Display
Templates
Hover Panel
Templates

10. Relevance Improvements
In Summary
• A search result, suggestion, or recommendation is
more relevant when it better satisfies the intent of the
person who issues the query. SharePoint Server 2013
improves relevance in areas such as freshness of search
results, linguistics, and document parsing.
• It also improves relevance in the following areas:
– New ranking models
– Analysis of content and user interaction
– Query rules
– Result sources

11. How Does SharePoint Search Work?

12. How does it work?
Result
Sources
Query
Rules
Display
Templates
Where should
these results
come from?
When should
we show these
results?
How should
these results
look?

13. Result Sources
• Combination of Federated Search and Scopes
– Other LOB applications such as Collab and Genius
• Exchange and other remote SharePoint farms are now a source
• Can apply query transformations
• Allow for real time injection of parameters
– “Only query content that was created by the current user”

14. Query Rules
• Allows you to help act upon the “intent” of the query
• New way to help you react to users and help them find what they
are looking for
• Have three elements:
– Query Conditions (matching rules)
– Query Actions (what happens when you find a match)
– Publishing options

15. Query Rule Conditions
• Conditions allow you to define the circumstances under which your
query rule will apply
• You can also match if a query is against a specific Result Source or
category (like a Topic Page category)
• Each Query Rule can have multiple conditions

16. Query Examples
Query Description
Query contains a specific word or
words
Simple keyword match
If someone searches for “Finances”,
then show a promoted result
Query contains a word in a specific
dictionary (term set)
Match to a term set
If someone search for a word that is
part of our taxonomy then add a result
block from this source
Results include a common result type
(like a file type)
If the results are mostly of a particular
file type
If a user searches and mostly PDFs are
returned then show the last 5 PDF files
they have created

17. Query Rule Actions
• Assign a “Promoted Result” to the query
• Create and Display a Result Block
– Result Blocks specify and additional query to run and how to
display the results
– You can include these results above the core results or sort by
ranking
– You can choose a custom display template
• Change the query that returns the core results
– Change the original query by changing the query terms

18. Display Templates
• Allows you to create a different way to display search results based
on the type of content
• Can be centrally managed or Site Collection managed

19. Putting it together
• A FAQ Base Example:
– Users search for a particular term that is part of a FAQ base
taxonomy
– We create a query rule that if a search word matches part of the
taxonomy then we will fire
– We create a Promoted Result that tells them where the FAQ
base item is located
– We create a Result Block that finds people that have the search
terms listed as part of their expertise on their profile
– We rank items from the FAQ base Content Source slightly higher
than other content

20. Analytics

21. Search include Analytics Platform
– Better scales. Based on Search
Service
– New features and scenarios
– Result in Webpart CBS (Content
By Search)
– Easy extensible from 3rd party.
– Lots of event tracked in real
time.
• Recommendations
• Usage Counts
• Activity Ranking ….

22. Search Analytics
Analysis Description
Anchor Text Processing Anchor text processing analyzes how items in the
content corpus (size and shape) are interlinked. It also
includes the anchor texts associated with the links in
the analysis. The Analytics Processing Component uses
the results of the analysis to add rank points to the
items in the search index.
Click Distance The Click Distance analysis calculates the number of
clicks between an authoritative page and the items in
the search index. An authoritative page can be a top
level site, or other pages viewed as important

23. Search Analytics
Analysis Description
Search Clicks The Search Clicks analysis uses information about
which items users click in search results to boost or
demote items in the search index. The analysis
calculates a new ranking of items compared to the
base relevance.
Social Tags The Social Tags analysis analyses social tags, which are
words or phrases that users can apply to content to
categorize information in ways that are meaningful to
them. In SharePoint Server 2013, social tags are not
used for refinement, ranking, or recall by default.
However, you can create custom search experiences
that use social tags and the information from this
analysis.

24. Search Analytics
Analysis Description
Social Distance The Social Distance analysis calculates the relationship
between users who use the Follow person feature. The
analysis calculates first and second level Followings:
first level Followings first, and then Followings of
Following. The information is used to sort People
Search results by social distance.
Deep Links The Deep Links analysis uses information about what
people actually click in the search results to calculate
what the most important sub-pages on a site are.
These pages are displayed in the search results as
important shortcuts for the site, and users can access
the relevant sub-pages directly from the search results.

25. Search Analytics
Analysis Description
Search Reports The Search Reports analysis aggregates data and
stores the data in the Analytics reporting database
where it's used to generate these search reports:
• Number of queries
• Top queries
• Abandoned queries
• No result queries
• Query rule usage
The report information is saved in the Search service
application, and not with the items in the search index.
If you delete the Search service application, the report
information is also deleted.

26. Usage Analytics
Analysis Description
Usage Counts The Usage counts analysis analyzes events, such as
viewed or clicked items. The analysis calculates how
many times an item is opened overall, not just from
the search result page, but also, for example, when a
document is opened from Word or clicked in a
SharePoint library.
Recommendations The Recommendations analysis creates
recommendations between items based on how users
have interacted with the items on a site. The analysis
uses the same event file as Usage counts, but looks for
patterns in the usage. The analysis calculates an item-to-
item relationship graph and adds the information
to the items in the search index.

27. Usage Analytics
Analysis Description
Activity ranking The Activity ranking analysis uses the activity tracking
of usage events (the event rate) to influence search
relevancy. Items that have high usage activity (clicks or
views) typically get a higher activity rank score than
less popular items.
The analysis looks for trends in item activity. If you
only count the number of events, older items will
typically “win” in relevancy, because the older
documents have had more time to collect activity. The
activity tracking helps newer documents that have
high usage activity get a higher rank.

28. Resources
• O365 Table: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint-online-search-service-
description.aspx
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263400(v=office.15)
• Results Templates: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/
library/dn386874(v=office.15).aspx
• Webtrends: http://sharepoint.webtrends.com/reporting