The SharePoint search is often a source of frustration for many employees, as it makes it difficult to find the right information quickly and easily. However, finding relevant information is a decisive factor for productivity and efficiency in day-to-day work. In this blog post, you will find out why the SharePoint search is so important and how you can optimize the SharePoint search to get to the information you need faster and in a more targeted way.
Table of Contents
What is the SharePoint search?
SharePoint Search makes it possible to quickly find content, documents and data in SharePoint environments. By using search algorithms and configurable search parameters, SharePoint offers a powerful platform that makes it easier for users to discover relevant information in large amounts of data. Especially in companies where hundreds of documents are created and shared every day, a well-functioning search is essential. Nevertheless, the SharePoint search is struggling to efficiently and purposefully search through data volumes that have grown over the years.
Why should the SharePoint search be optimized?
Even if the SharePoint search already offers many functions, companies can often benefit from targeted optimization. An optimized SharePoint search leads to:
- Faster search results: Customized search parameters and indexing techniques speed up searches.
- Greater relevance: With the right configuration, search results are better tailored to individual user needs.
- Improved usability: An intuitive search process saves time and increases user satisfaction.
- More efficient access to information: Employees can access the data they need in a targeted and effective manner, making their day-to-day work easier.
All of this in turn leads to higher employee satisfaction, fewer errors in everyday work and therefore higher quality work.
Tips for optimizing the SharePoint search
To sustainably improve your SharePoint search, the following strategies and best practices can be applied:
1. Adapt the search schema
Adapt the search schema to the specific requirements of your company. By defining custom managed properties and crawling policies, you can ensure that all relevant content is captured and indexed correctly.
2. Create custom search queries
Use the option to create custom search queries to focus the search more precisely on specific content. More precise results can be achieved by using filter options and search parameters, although the definition of these parameters is not entirely intuitive.
3. Increase the relevance of search results
Configure the weighting of individual content to ensure that the most important and up-to-date documents appear at the top of the search results. User feedback and usage statistics can also help to continuously improve relevance.
4. Use metadata and tags
Structured storage and the use of metadata not only make document management easier, but also the SharePoint search. Through targeted tagging and categorization of content, you increase findability and thus improve the efficiency of the search. However, this requires defined and maintained tags.
5. Regular maintenance and analysis
Carry out regular maintenance and analysis of the search logs in order to identify weak points and exploit optimization potential. Adapt your strategies to changing workflows and data volumes.
Integrating AI search into SharePoint – how it works
Anyone who has read the previous tips will have noticed that dedicated resources are required to continuously monitor, analyze and support SharePoint search. For many companies, however, the use of these resources makes little sense, as the search is often only a by-product and not the main focus of an IT department. This department concentrates more on infrastructure and process issues. Nevertheless, there are AI searches for SharePoint, for example, that can take on such challenges automatically.
One solution is an enterprise search solution such as amberSearch. amberSearch enables employees to find information in SharePoint quickly and easily on the basis of semantic relevance. Content is not only searched by keywords, but also analyzed in terms of content with the help of AI. These are the biggest differences between amberSearch and the classic SharePoint search:
- Semantic analysis instead of pure keywords: amberSearch’s AI builds its own index that semantically links all content in SharePoint. This allows documents to be found that match the content, even if the exact search terms were not used.
- Interactive search results: Employees can interact with the search results – similar to a chat. This allows summaries or automatic responses to be generated based on internal knowledge. This function not only makes it easier to find relevant information quickly, but also supports efficient further processing of the data.
- Integration of multiple data sources: amberSearch goes beyond a pure SharePoint search. It also includes content from other systems such as Outlook, Teams or internal drives. This creates a uniform, centralized information landscape that significantly simplifies access to company-relevant data.
- Automated monitoring and maintenance: The AI continuously analyzes the search index and adapts it to changing data volumes and structures. This reduces the manual maintenance effort and ensures that the search results always remain up-to-date and relevant.
Do you want to know how an AI search works not only in SharePoint, but also across systems? Then watch this video now:
Conclusion
Optimizing SharePoint search can help companies to improve the efficiency and relevance of search results. However, this requires continuous adjustments, maintenance and configurations, which are associated with considerable resource expenditure. Instead of continuously optimizing SharePoint search, the use of modern AI-powered enterprise search solutions such as amberSearch can be a much better alternative. Thanks to semantic analysis, interactive search results and the integration of various data sources, amberSearch enables a more intuitive, precise and efficient search – without the high manual maintenance effort. Companies thus benefit from faster and more intelligent access to information, which sustainably increases productivity. If you would like to take a deep dive into AI-powered SharePoint search, please get in touch with us: