Forum Discussion
Improving SPO/Delve Search
MicrosoftCertainly, as was just said, it's our goal to make everything findable. We have a lot of exciting improvements to search--both in experience, personalization and underlying content--underway. Can't discuss any specific plans, but I can say there will be some good news for you as this year progresses, and the journey will be ongoing.
On a similar note, danholme, there are a lot of different search boxes in O365. Do they all search the same things? For example, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Groups, Planner, Teams, Yammer, OWA. Is it all one central search center or are these disparate systems? (Well, I guess SPO and OD4B are the same.)
If they're disparate, is there a consolidated search solution on the roadmap? It's kind of hard to suggest search as a good way to find things if it's only searching relative locations. I guess I'd like to see an O365 search (that takes queries the way SP does) that returns results similar to how Windows search scours my whole PC.
Thanks!
Hi Deleted
Either my tenant is bugged or I can pretty much confirm that not all "global search" locations have access to the same index. Maybe someone else could pitch in with their experience. Here are mine:
- portal.office.com - Search as you type box
- hit and miss for me - usually I have some luck finding documents even from private Office 365 Groups - today I'm getting zero results - nada
- I often had an out of date index for search as you type - usually new files would show up - but moved and deleted files as well (usually for a couple of days). This resulted in a few dead (404) links when selecting the suggested document
- portal.office.com - pressing enter after typing keyword
- for the life of me I can't figure out what index is being used here
- New SharePoint Home - search as you type
- shows the Title information instead of FileName - so it looks a little different and pulls documents a little differently if filename and title do not match
- New SharePoint Home - pressing enter after keyword entry
- gives me the best search experience for SharePoint documents at the moment
- unlike the search as you type results, pressing enter again shows filenames and not titles (I prefer filenames)
- offers additional filtering options
- index seems very fresh
- Classic SharePoint Enterprise search
- SharePoint index might be same as for portal.office.com (search as you type) as I can't find any documents from private groups here either
- Delve
- indexes only public Office 365 Groups and classic SharPoint Team Sites (like the root site collection)
- returns Title for Office documents and SharePoint Pages, but returns filenames for PDFs
- I haven't been able to get an answer when private groups will be finally supported or what the hold up is
- http://fasttrack.microsoft.com/roadmap?filters=#R-31853 (this has been rollout out for "ages" :))
As you see, very different results, and that was just from a SharePoint / document point of view. There currently is now "global search" the queries all diffent content types or new apps (like PowerBi, ...).
This is a really thorough response, thanks Ivan54. We definitely need a definitive source that explains what all of these boxes do. Search has improved so much since my early SP days with SP2007. The results and UX has gotten a ton better. People have actually noted the improvement and are less critical of SP search. But now that experience is getting split up into various compartments that have no map. Can be very frustrating.
- portal.office.com - Search as you type box
