What's new in SharePoint Enterprise Search

SharePoint enterprise search is finally getting some new additions (possibly as part of the much anticipated and much delayed Project Cortex)

Microsoft recently announced a number of features are being removed and lots of new features are being added (most are already available for 0365 customers).

Briefly, here are some things that are going:

• - The old Fast Query Language (FQL) is on its way out. This was only used to code search queries. You can still use the newer Keyword Query Langauge (KQL)

• - Lots of search query conditions are going from the classic search experience starting January 2021
• - Authoritative pages (the ability to bump up the authority of a URL) are also going

It looks like the classic search experience will be slowly phased out along with FQL and anything else legacy over the next 12 months. It's a good bet that search best bets will soon be gone also.

So, what is new in Enterprise Search for SharePoint?

Administrators of Microsoft Search can access the tenant usage analytics reports through the Microsoft Admin center under Settings | Search and intelligence | Insights. To access the tenant level reports you will need to be assigned to one of the following roles- search admin, search editor, global admin, or global reader in Microsoft admin center.

New Search reports

A new home for all your search usage reports enabling you to gain more understanding of how search is functioning in your organization. The insights generated from these reports will help you make content easy to find and take actions that will make search a more useful and delightful experience for your users.

Answers

Search answers are actually a collection of five new features which move things significantly on from promoted results and best bets, the new five features to play with are:

• Acronymns - you can create an organisational list of common acronyms. If the user searches for an acronyms then they will get an definition and description.
• Bookmarks - a replacement for best bets. Bookmarks allow you to place a search result at the top of the page to match any query you like.
• Floorplans - Search for a user and floorplans can show an image of where their desk is (pretty cool stuff).



• Locations - Returns search results that show office or building locations.



• Q & As- Similar to bookmarks but aimed at interpreting a question to return the best result.

Some of the search answer features above including some AI based data-mining to provide additional functionality although the details are a little vague currently.

Summary

The new Search answer features: Acronymns, Bookmanrk, Floorplans, Locations and Q&A's will allow you to tune SharePoint search to deliver better results. Use your search logs to see what people are searching for and work with subject matter experts to create entries that guide users to the best resources.

Bookmarks and Q&A's deliver quite a similar experience but are easy to setup-up. Locations are impressive and easy to set-up also. We haven't tried setting up floorplans, they look at little more trick and require DWG (Autocad with text labels) files.