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Home Sites and Microsoft Search

Brass Contributor

Greetings all, I am gathering information regarding implications of using the new Home Sites feature, and I'm curious about any search scope differences between a regular hub site search and a hub site that has been designated as the SharePoint Home site. Specifically, the hub site and its associated satellites are being designed to serve as authoritative information in the org. My question is, would designating the hub as the Home Site change that scope to include all of SharePoint, even sites not associated with the intranet hub? We want to be thoughtful about this decision. Many thanks for your input!

5 Replies

My understanding is when setting the home site it changes the search scope to organization. But it’s an easy PowerShell flag to set the search scope on a site which you can just set the search scope back to hub only. I’m 'think' this could work, if you have a test setup you could run it on first. Or give me a few hours and I’ll confirm on my test tenant home site but I don’t see why it wouldn’t!

Here are instructions. Set scope to 0 should put scope back to a hub scope (default)

To change this setting:
1. Start PowerShell in administrator mode as you will be installing the PnP extensions.
2. Run the following commands to in this order:
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline
# If you previously had installed this module, you may need to use the "-Force" parameter to install the newer version.

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Connect-PnPOnline -Url https://contosodemosg.sharepoint.com/sites/Strategy -UseWebLogin
# this will prompt you to sign into your site. Use the site owner credentials to sign in

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> $web = Get-PnPWeb
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> $web.SearchScope = 1
# 1 for Tenant, 0 for default behavior
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> $web.Update()
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Invoke-PnPQuery

best response confirmed by Erin_Kester (Brass Contributor)
Solution
Ok. So ignore this. Apparently no matter what you do, once you set a site as a HomeSite it locks in the Search scope and cannot be changed via this override method. So you can change hub searches, but HomeSite designation cannot be changed from what I can tell.

@Chris WebbThank you for investigating this, it is a huge relief to understand the implications on search!  

@Chris Webb not sure if something has changed since you posted way back when but I have just managed to change the search scope on our home site from 'Tenant' to 'Hub' using the instructions on this page https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftsearch/manage-spo-search-box

@andrewmarr These are my findings:

  • I can successfully run the PowerShell commands to set the search scope to "site" on the homesite.
  • In the searchbox on the homesite, the hint text does say "Search this site".
  • However, results are still surfaced from across the entire tenant, even though the breadcrumb would lead you to believe it only searches the current site.

OliverR1982_0-1701168032365.png

I'm curious as to what other people's experiences are. For me specifically, I have a customer who would like the search scope of their homesite to be just that single site; they don't have any hubsites, just a single site. It seems that, for me at least, even though the search scope seems to be set to the current site only, the results are surfaced from across the tenant regardless.

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by Erin_Kester (Brass Contributor)
Solution
Ok. So ignore this. Apparently no matter what you do, once you set a site as a HomeSite it locks in the Search scope and cannot be changed via this override method. So you can change hub searches, but HomeSite designation cannot be changed from what I can tell.

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