Forum Discussion
Implementing Cloud Hybrid Search
#1 Yes, you can have 2 SSAs crawling the same content. If you make no changes, the results will only appear in Office 365 since the Index is there. So if you are doing query federation in Office 365, you may want to stop that.
#2 Yes, you can. Only the Cloud SSA will feed Office 365/SPO so you will see duplicate results in your on-prem federated queries.
#3 When searching in SPO you will see all results, SPO and on-prem, so you will probably need to clarify what the federated query results are. On-Prem you will create a new Result Source for SPO and (in most cases) make it the default.
I think the main challenge you will face is duplication of results as you transition.
Matthew McDermott Thanks for your input! Pretty much you are spot on what I was thinking as well. Duplication of search results is something that I'm trying to manage, and try to herd the cats as much as I can :) I am planning to use the isexternalcontent property for this purpose. Any other additional thoughts around this ?
That's how I would handle it. Create a plan for the roll out and assign Result Source rules to each phase so you can manage the transition. That will help you with the end user perception.
Thanks Matthew McDermott - I also think there needs to be a step to manage the on-premises Default proxy group for web apps. I may have to create a new proxy group that includes Cloud SSA but not the regular SSA so that web apps can be moved to leverage 1 search SSA, not the other.... Because I am not sure if I can create result sources in regular search that will can point to local sharepoint results of Cloud ssa. So by implementing another proxy group, web apps can be forced to not use regular SSA but the cloud ssa, and its local sharepoint results result source which includes the cloud results.