Topic: Unable to Edit or Delete Promoted Results - Pros/Cons of Organization Search

We've run into an ongoing issue in utilizing Promoted Results in our SharePoint environment (specific questions below). We utilize a scoped search to just search a single site collection and have historically used Promoted Results frequently to ensure our most commonly used resources fire at the top of our search results for users.

Earlier this year, we suddenly were no longer able to edit our Promoted Results. Every attempt at saving any changes or even deleting the entire query rule resulted in an error message and no change to the rule. As a result we now have Promoted Results firing that feature broken URLs. We cannot change them or delete them. A developer we work with attempted to override and make changes via a PowerShell script, but he was unsuccessful. We are aware of the deprecation of Promoted Results in favor of Bookmarks. However, this should not impact our ability to simply delete existing Promoted Results.

We escalated the issue to Microsoft and were told there is a "corruption" in our site that is not fixable. The proposed solution provided by Microsoft was to rebuild our entire site and migrate our entire site collection to the new environment. We have a lot of customization in our existing site, and we don't feel the workload of this rebuild is the right approach at this time, and we are covering all our bases.

We recognize that moving forward to utilizing Bookmarks may be our only option, and we have tested Bookmarks in our environment. Bookmarks however only fire on Organization search (i.e., not in our scoped search environment). Organization search currently pulls in too many non-relevant search results that we don't want our users to see, but it may be the only environment where we can ensure our broken Promoted Results aren't appearing.

My questions for the community based on this are:

• Has anyone encountered a similar error with Promoted Results - as in, the results are firing, but you are unable to edit or delete them on the back-end? Has anyone found a solution to this issue? At this point, we would settle for just being able to delete the corrupted query rules.
• If we have to switch to Organization Search, is anyone aware of any customization available within Organization Search? We've historically used query rules (not just promoted results) to ensure certain results are elevated, and we don't want to lost that customization. What are the pros and cons of utilizing Organization search as our main search feature?
• Is there any other solution here that we are missing?

My apologies if any of my terminology or explanation is lacking. I do appreciate any feedback as we are still struggling to find the best solution.