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.
I sure hope that it is soon.
We drank the kool-aid and started using Teams. Nothing that I have done for the past month is showing up in Delve. This has decreased the value of Delve substantially. However, the new sites created for our MS Teams do show up on the SPO Home Page. How do I explain these types of inconsistencies to our customers?
While the Hybrid search story is quite impressive, it is somewhat less awesome when you realize that yammer content is not included in the combined search results. We have been waiting on this integration for a long time with nothing on the Roadmap to indicate that it is even beeing worked on.
- Not to mention the story of search web parts. We've build so many solutions with display templates, search queries, and refiners that don't seem they will have a place in the modern UI.
I'll wait and hope for the best. Seems to me the direction shown at Ignite is contextualized search...where you get data where you are working. This does not say a unified global index of sorts, and I'm unsure how smart one big index actually is for all kinds of content.
The old story of mixing apples and oranges (which in a fruit salad is a good idea ;) )
I do get the unified index q a lot, but more often than not without very good use cases attached for it. And when usecases come, they can often be solved by thinking about it a bit different. Of course, unifying results from multiple repos takes a dev effort.
Here's one discrepancy which illustrates the problem of multiple teams doing search stuff, which ideally could be unified. SP search API allows you to fine OneNote pages. MS Graph OneNote API allows search of OCR'd images in those same pages. Two teams, two API's, same rawdata.
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
