As you probably already know, SharePoint Online is one of the best ways to store your organization's important documents. That's why it's important that you be able to find your files and information whenever you need them. Let's take a look at how you can improve how you company finds documents in SharePoint Online.
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The easiest way to search for documents in SharePoint Online is to use the search bar at the top of your site.
By typing a phrase up here, SharePoint will show you a selection of files and folders that are related to your search query. For example, if you type "Security" into the search bar, SharePoint Online will show you documents with Security in the title, content, or metatags. It will generally order the content by what SharePoint deems most relevant to the search query.
When you make a search, you can also filter out some of the content. Click Filters in the top right and you'll be able to change what information SharePoint displays based on your filters.
While searching in SharePoint is powerful, there are multiple ways that you can improve how it works for your organization. However, before we look into that, let's take a look at how the search feature in SharePoint Online Works.
The files that SharePoint pulls up when you search on a site can come from anywhere on the site. However, SharePoint doesn't trawl through your whole site whenever you enter a search query. Instead it pulls results from the Search Index. The Search Index is a repository of all of the indexed content on your site. Only items that are in your search index can appear in search results. If you are interested in learning more about this process, we wrote a blog on the indexing and crawling process.
By default, SharePoint adds all of the content on your site into that site's search index. However, site owners and site collection administrators can modify what content appears in the search results.
Starting at the top, site owners have the ability to choose if content from their site can appear in search results. Let's take a look at how to either add or exclude a site:
Site owners can also choose specific content from their site to not show up in search results. Let's take a look at how to modify that option:
In addition to add/excluding sites and content, site owners can also choose whether to include content in specific columns in list or libraries in search results. Let's take a look at how to do that:
Beyond just choosing whether or not a site, list, or library will appear in search results, there are other things you can do to customize how your users search in your SharePoint sites.
While we've written a more in-depth blog about this subject in the past, we'll do a brief overview of the tips you can use to make finding documents in SharePoint Online easier.
Always check the titles of your documents. Make sure they match the content of the document so that it will appear higher in relevant search results.
SharePoint metadata is a great tool for sorting your documents. Make sure you're using accurate meta tags in all of your documents.
You should set column value defaults at the folder level. This will automatically assign metadata to the files you create in that folder.
Document IDs are unique tags that are assigned to files in a site collection. If you know a document's ID, you can enter the ID into the search bar and find it easily.
Often considered a marketing term, Search Engine Optimization also applies to search in SharePoint Online. Think about keywords and key phrases in a document and use variations on those keywords to make it easier for people to find the document.
It's amazing the level of control that SharePoint offers users to locate and find documents in SharePoint Online. Check out the options we've provided above to take control of how people find documents within your organization.