SharePoint Online Search& External Results

Sharon RichardsonJoining Dots

www.joiningdots.com / sharepointsharon.com

Background

SharePoint Online includes most of the search features available in an on-premise SharePoint Server deployment. But you cannot include external web sites in your index. For good reason. You can however display external web sites in results by using federated queries. i.e. let another search engine do the indexing and include their results alongside your own.

This presentation will walk through presenting Internet search results alongside internal search results for a single query. All steps and images are based on SharePoint Online as part of an Office 365 Enterprise subscription based on features available at the time of writing: July 2013

Preparation

This solution is created within the Enterprise Search Center site template. Navigate to the site to perform the following steps. If you haven’t already got one, go create and configure it first…

…note: for SharePoint Online, you’ll already have one. The URL should be https://<yourtenancy>.sharepoint.com/search/

…that said, it’s not a bad idea to create a separate test site using the appropriate template to experiment with first.

Step 1: Create a search page

Navigate to the Pages library within Site Content. Use the New button within the page menu to create a new page. Select the content type ‘Welcome Page’

Step 1: Create a search page

Give the page a name and title. You can see in this dialogue that the Welcome template is ‘Welcome (Search Results)’. Depending on the version of SharePoint you are working with, you may also see other page templates listed

Additional tip:Don’t forget to check-in and publish the page

Step 2: Edit Search Navigation

Navigate to Site Settings – Search SettingsUnder Configure Search Navigation, add a link pointing to your newly created search results page:

Note:This process has changed from SP2010, replacing the use of search tabs

Step 3: Create a Results source

To display results from an external source, in SharePoint 2013 we have to create a results source. For this example, I am going to use Bing to keep it simple. You can use any search engine that returns results using the OpenSearch 1.0/1.1 protocol (essentially, RSS formatted results). You can also point to Exchange Servers (for querying email archives) and other SharePoint servers (if you have a hybrid scenario of both on-premise and online SharePoint servers).

Note: This feature replaces the separate use of Search Scopes and Federated Locations in older versions of SharePoint

Step 3: Create a Results source

Navigate to Site Settings – Result Sources and click New Result Source. Enter the following settings: (pick your own title)Protocol: OpenSearch 1.0/1.1Query Transform: {searchTerms} (default)Source Url: http://www.bing.com/search?q={searchTerms} &Format=RSS&Market=en-gbCredentials: Anonymous (don’t need to login to view results)

Notes: ‘Market=en-gb’ is optional, it prioritises regional results (in this case, the UK). Leave it out or enter your preferred country code

Step 4: Configure the results page

Navigate to your new search results page and Edit the page. Then edit the Search Results web part and click the button ‘Change Query’

In the dialogue box, select your new Results Source, click OK, apply, save and publish the page. Don’t worry of the Search Results displays ‘Sorry, something went wrong.’ It does that when there is no search query to display results for. If it still shows the message after publishing the page, then you have got an error to fix.

End result

Our search site now has a page dedicated to Bing, displaying results for ‘SharePoint’. Well done Wikipedia…

BUT THERE’S MORE...

Step 5: Create a query rule

Query rules are new to SharePoint 2013 and enable you to promote key results and integrate different results sources as blocks onto a single page. They also wrap up a lot of older features, such as file types, the old query rules generator and separate federated search results web parts.

To demonstrate, we will create a query rule so that searches for ‘SharePoint’ display Bing results embedded within the standard local search results

Step 5: Create a query rule

Navigate to Site Settings – Query Rules. In Manage Query Rules, for the context, select the Local SharePoint Results and then click New Query Rule.

Note:In this image, we are creating a query rule for when anyone searches for the word ‘SharePoint’

We also want to display a results block…

Step 5: Create a query rule

A query rule can be configured to display blocks of results from different Resources Sources

Notes:We’ve modified the title to display ‘Bing Results for…’, selected the Results Source, configured the number of results to display and to display a More results link that redirects to the full Bing site

End result this time

When we type in a search for ‘SharePoint’, we don’t have to navigate to the separate Bing results page to view Internet results. (I pinned the block to the top of results for visibility)

Further reading

To find out more (Microsoft TechNet)• Configure results sources for search in SharePoint 2013

http://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj683115%28v=office.15%29

• Manage query ruleshttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj871676.aspx

Related blog postshttp://www.sharepointsharon.com/tag/search/