I thought I would share some tips and tricks for improving the search experience with SharePoint:
| In any company you will have people of different backgrounds and skills using SharePoint, and one of the first issues is that search isn’t fine grained enough, and that users either don’t know or don’t feel comfortable with advanced search features to get it fine grained. To make “normal” search easier just add Faceted Search. If you are interested in what that is go and check out the site. Next improve usage by lighting up SharePoint search to the browsers. Well what does that mean? It means that when you go to a website with a modern browser it “detects” the search functionality and allows you to add it to the build in search functions in your browser, so you can search the SharePoint site from your browser without even going to it first! It does this using an open standard called Open Search. To do this you first need to define an XML file which tells the browser what to do. Example:
Really simple, basically just the name and the encoding. The magic is handled by replacing the tag in the URL ({searchTerms}) with what the user is searching for. That file needs to be uploaded to a location on the SharePoint site where it can be read by users. The next step is exposing it to the browsers, to do this you just need to add a line to the header tag in your master page: 1: <link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="/search/searchdefination.xml" title="BB&D Portal" /> Now the browsers will see the tag and light up the search facility! This is really helpful for improving adoption of search. Next up it would be great to search multiple locations and you can thanks to a feature in SP 1 called federated search. Where your search query actually calls other web sites for results and places them in a special section of the site, defined by a web part. As I am personally interested in a lot of technologies I think it would be great to have federated search to: Wikipedia, Linux.Com, Java.Sun.Com, MSDN.Microsoft.Com and TechNet.Microsoft.Com, like shown on the left. What you may notice is that MSDN already has support for federated search, but the rest don’t! So how do you get around that? Well Live.Com also does has support for federated search and it also has support for limiting results to a specific site. So all that is needed to do is to create a search provider configuration for live.com and limit it to the specified website. You can download the sample providers I created below: |
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The last tip is to implement a very clean landing page for the site with a search box on it. As the new landing is cleaner and smaller than the it meant the initial feeling of SharePoint is it is that it is quicker and more responsive and so it also will improve adoption. To get the search box to search properly using just a tiny bit of HTML + JavaScript which looks like this (assuming you have a textbox with ID called query), this will create the button:
1: <input type="button" width="100px" height="" value="Search" onclick="window.location='/pages/SearchResults.aspx?k='+document.getElementById('query').value+'&s=All%20Sites';">