Have you ever noticed how much nonsense or irrelevant results come back from various search queries? It's nobody's fault. The content is out there and happens to match the terms we are searching. But do we really need all of this stuff if it's not useful?
I have been recently fine-tuning what comes back in search results. People want content. They don't want containers of content, lists of content, links to content - just plain results they can use. Therefore, I have tweaked my main results to perform the following:
I only performed these tweaks on my main results page (a.k.a. Everything) by modifying the query on the Search Results web part:
Full List Results (AllItems.aspx)
How many search results show the AllItems.aspx view?? In some queries it's every result. We just need the list item itself, not the full list of irrelevant items. Therefore I decided to filter that out too:
Links List Items
We happen to use many lists of links to display items on various department, office, or home pages. They are convienent and provide an easy way to add a new link to a page. However, for search results, we want links to the main content, not links to links to content. For this I needed to add a filter using the contentclass property:
Links Lists
Removing the link items was good but now the entire links list is being returned in results. Might as well remove that too:
Explorer View
Finally I noticed web folders correlating to Explorer Views of lists being returned. There is no need to gunk up the results with various views. Therefore I filtered these out as well using the secret STS_List_850 contentclass:
My final query text?
Here is what I have so far to get all of the junk out of my search results:
I have been recently fine-tuning what comes back in search results. People want content. They don't want containers of content, lists of content, links to content - just plain results they can use. Therefore, I have tweaked my main results to perform the following:
- Remove excess external content type links and nonsense
- Remove Folders from search results
- Remove overall list results (AllItems.aspx)
- Remove Link List Items
- Remove Link Lists
- Remove Explorer Views (web folder results)
I only performed these tweaks on my main results page (a.k.a. Everything) by modifying the query on the Search Results web part:
External Content Type Nonsense
Even though I created custom Result Sources and Result Types for some of my external content data (aka BDC/BCS stuff), I noticed I would still get crazy bdc3:// results back. This was the first thing I removed:
Folders
I noticed folders being returned, which may be correct, but we want content - not the containers of content. I opened one of my folder results and it brought me to a list of --- more folders!! Ahh. We don't need that. Therefore I added another property filter as follows:
How many search results show the AllItems.aspx view?? In some queries it's every result. We just need the list item itself, not the full list of irrelevant items. Therefore I decided to filter that out too:
Links List Items
We happen to use many lists of links to display items on various department, office, or home pages. They are convienent and provide an easy way to add a new link to a page. However, for search results, we want links to the main content, not links to links to content. For this I needed to add a filter using the contentclass property:
Removing the link items was good but now the entire links list is being returned in results. Might as well remove that too:
Explorer View
Finally I noticed web folders correlating to Explorer Views of lists being returned. There is no need to gunk up the results with various views. Therefore I filtered these out as well using the secret STS_List_850 contentclass:
Here is what I have so far to get all of the junk out of my search results:
Conclusion
I am getting cleaner results with mostly documents, posts, relevant list items, calendar items, etc. I am starting to feel much better with the improvement on our relevancy.
Search on!!!
NOW AVAILABLE!!!
