Forum Discussion
SharePoint Search Result Blocks appear inconsistently when same search performed repeatedly
Hello all,
I am setting up search in SharePoint Online for my client.
We have added a couple of Result Sources of the OpenSearch type which point to Bing to allow results from two public-facing websites to be incorporated into the search results.
We have tweaked the Source Url for these a few times and we are happy that they are now returning the correct results. Here's an example:
http://www.bing.com/search?q={?searchTerms}+site:www.microsoft.com&format=rss&Market=en-GB
We have then added two Query Rules to the default "Local SharePoint Results" results source.
These are set up to run every time ("This rule fires on any query text") and each adds a Results Block using the setting "Promoted (shown above ranked results in this order)", pointing to each of the two OpenSearch Result Sources. We originally set up these Query Rules without customing the Block Title field ("Results for...") but then went back and modified the Block Title for each of them so that the user can see which source the results are coming from.
When the user searches for results in the Search Center site, the SharePoint results appear consistently. But the two results blocks are usually not shown. Sometimes one is shown, and sometimes the other is shown. Around one in twenty searches, both are shown correctly. Sometimes, one is shown, but without its customised Block Title, implying it is a cached older version of the Query Rule, or that the settings we have defined have not been correctly replicated between multiple search query servers. When the blocks do appear, the results within them are correct.
To be clear, this is using a single search term which we know should return results from both OpenSearch sources, and we are repeatedly refreshing the results page to get different results each time.
We have waited at least 72 hours to see whether this is simply a case of letting things 'catch up' behind the scenes, but we still have this issue. I have then tried tweaking the settings to see if we can force a 'catch-up' but this hasn't worked either.
Can anyone suggest anything?
Many thanks
- Weird, have you tried creating another search center to test it there. And you might want to log a support ticket. Could be an issue where the QR server in the search farm times out on the OpenSearch calls.
- Thanks for your reply. I haven't tried a new search center, but I can see the intermittent behaviour from within the Search Admin pages, from the test function in the query builder popup. If I repeatedly test the same query from within there I get a different response - either zero results or the correct results.
I'm not sure about it being a timeout as the empty results sets are just as instantaneous as the successful ones.
I think a support ticket might be the best way forward.- Could be that each test is hitting different servers and that the rules have not synched correcectly to all servers. Have you tried to open the rules and re-save them?
