SharePoint News not showing up in search results

Bronze Contributor

We have several SharePoint Online sites with News, all but 1 is showing up in search results. Searching for any word in the News title from this site returns nothing, this includes from the office.com landing page and the site itself. (on the site itself, it will show up as suggested until the enter button is hit, then it returns 0 results)

 

  • Site Pages library is configured to show in search results
  • Site Search & Offline Availability configured to appear in search results
  • Indexing ASPX Page Content configured to Always Index all Web Parts
  • I have reindexed both the Site Pages Library and the Site

Any ideas? 

7 Replies
This may seem obvious, but have you verified that each one of the News pages on the site is published? I have seen issues like this before and the answer has always been “oops!” To make sure, be sure that you are showing Version in the view of the Site Pages library. If the version doesn’t end in .0, the page is unpublished. If it starts with 0 then the page has never been published and will only be visible to Editors on the site in the News web part.

Hi @Susan Hanley - thanks for jumping on the thread - I hadn't thought to check that but hey have been published. I'm getting close to opening a help desk ticket because it just seems so strange.

@Kelly_Edinger If you navigate to the affected site and search:

 

  • Can you search from the site front page search box and find the news article?
  • Can you search from the Pages library and find the article by a name in the title?
  • Is the page promoted as a news page, and not just a regular page?

If you are a bit powershell savy I'll be shameless and plug my recent book on troubleshooting:

https://www.amazon.com/Troubleshooting-Search-SharePoint-Online-solving/dp/1080506411

 

Basically a lot of steps I used before as a consultant to go thru before filing a support ticket.

 

Technically I can explain why you see it in the query box and not results themselves, as they have different logic behind them. It's about files/pages you have used/visited before.

 

hi@Mikael Svenson - thanks for this but I actually finally found the very weird problem - site was shared with too many individual users: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/troubleshoot/search/items-missing-from-search-results

 

Changed the permissions - everything is now showing up in search results.

Good one, and something I'll update in my book :)

Hi @Kelly_Edinger,

 

Did you solve the issue? I'm facing same error (or something like that):

1. With Site Owner, I can perform search and get results (including News).

2. With Site Reader (User A), I can perform search and get results (including News).

3. With Site Reader (User B), I can perform search but I don't get results from News.

 

I already verified all News posts and all of them are Published and don't have unique permissions.

 

Do anybody has any idea?

 

Thanks.

Hi @briangarnica - yes, I solved it with the link I mentioned above: 

 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/troubleshoot/search/items-missing-from-search-results

 

Yours sounds like it may be different if 2 users are able to successfully search and find News if both user A and B have the same permissions. Check out the link anyways, it was interesting to learn that too many site members listed could mess up search. 

 

good luck!