Improve Findability Using SharePoint Search

Search authoritative pages are essential for promoting specific pages of your Site or other websites within the organic search results section of the Search Results Page. Pages may also be demoted if you do not want certain Pages to be ranked as well.

Best Bets are similar to Sponsored Links seen on popular Internet search engines today. Best Bets target specific pieces of content to users searching for a specific keyword or phrase. For example, if you had an upcoming event called “Child Education Conference”, you could ensure its information Page is returned in search results when users search using the keyword “children” and “kid” and “conference.” You may have multiple Best Bets running simultaneously. Best Bets are commonly used for promoting events and otherwise important content. The Search Usage Reports (discussed later in this chapter) can help you understand what users are looking for and NOT finding – a perfect example of when to use a Best Bets.

By default, Best Bets are represented with a star icon. The Best Bets Web Part is used to display them. As with all SharePoint Web Parts, you can move them around the page, and add or delete them from a page.

The first step in setting up Best Bets is determining the URL of the page you want users directed to. This can be any URL, internal or external website, SharePoint or not. You should also have at least one Keyword in mind (more than one is even better). Additionally, you should have the text already prepared which will make up the best bet; this includes the Title and Description. In other words; when someone types a Keyword into the Search Box and clicks the search button, you want them to see [Title and Description]. When they click on it, you want this [URL] to load.

If you want even more capability and search power, look into FAST Search for SharePoint. FAST adds User Context capabilities to model search behavior differently for various user collections as well as Visual Best Bets and Site Promotion/Demotion in the context of users. FAST is incredible.

You can customize the search results page to compliment your business objectives. Of course, you’ll want to brand the Search Results page to match your website with colors, styles, fonts, etc. The Master Page applied to the Site will handle the branding of these elements. Branding the search results page to match your Site is just part of the equation. You can configure the Search Results Page to format and display results, Best Bests, and related content in a way which will compliment your business objectives.

The SharePoint Search results page consists of several Web Parts. Each Web Part performs a specific task. You may configure each Web Part to behave as desired. You can arrange the placement of these Web Parts as you wish. You can remove Web Parts you don’t want to use, and add multiple instances of the same Web Part as needed.

The Search Center Template is a SharePoint Site Template used specifically for creating Search Centers. Your SharePoint Site may have zero, one, or multiple Search Centers, depending on your specific requirements and business objectives. Search Centers can be thought of as a search “hub”, and are typically used as a central search area of a Site. They provide all the necessary components for users to quickly and easily find what they are looking for. While it is common to provide a search box on every page of your site, once a search is issued, the resulting search results page is typically located within the Search Center itself.

Once your Search Center is created, you can add tabs to further enhance the search experience. Tabs are typically used to provide users the ability to search specific Scopes. For example, you may only want to search your organization’s internal intranet Site, or maybe you only want to search your organization’s extranet Site or public-facing website. Perhaps you want to search for people or receive results only from external Sites. For more information about Search Scopes, see the “Search Scopes” section of this chapter.

A search tab is just a link to a Search Result Page which has been set up to display a specific result type. For example, the “People” tab is used if you are looking for a specific person. The “All Sites” tab is used for searching everywhere – the entire corpus. If your search has been set up to crawl external sites, a tab called “External Sites” might be useful.

Since a tab is really just a link to a Page, the first step involved in adding a new tab is to create a new Page. Once you have created your new search results Page, it’s simply a matter of adding the new tab to point to it, and configuring the new Page to honor the appropriate Search Scope.

The SharePoint search engine also provides federated search capabilities. Federated search enables the search to be processed by another search engine, not the SharePoint search engine. The search term is passed to the external search engine (like Bing for example). Bing performs the search and returns results to be displayed on your search result page. Results are displayed within the Federated Search Web Part, typically located alongside the results returned from your SharePoint search engine.

Microsoft provides an online gallery of preconfigured Federated Search connections, making this configuration as simple as a click of the mouse. However, you’re not limited to only those preconfigured connections provided by Microsoft, as you can integrate your Federated Search with any other available search technology.