Overview
SharePoint search is more than a text box — it is a configurable platform that can be tuned to surface the right content for your users. Built on Microsoft’s FAST search technology, SharePoint’s search engine crawls and indexes content across your sites, then returns ranked results for any query a user submits.
This article covers how to write effective search queries, how to refine results, and how to configure query rules to promote content and add result blocks that improve the search experience for your organization.
In SharePoint Online (Microsoft 365), Microsoft manages the Search service automatically. New or updated content typically appears in search results within an hour of creation. In SharePoint On-Premises, your administrator controls the crawl schedule.
How SharePoint Search Works
Under the hood, SharePoint search runs as a Search service that continuously crawls content across your sites and builds an index. When a user submits a query, the Search service consults that index and returns a ranked results page — it does not scan live content in real time.
FAST search technology, originally developed by a Norwegian company acquired by Microsoft, is now integrated directly into SharePoint. Every search you run in a modern SharePoint environment uses FAST technology transparently.
If a document you just created does not appear in search results, the Search service has not yet crawled and indexed it. For SharePoint Online tenants, no action is required — indexing happens automatically.
Writing Effective Search Queries
The Search text box appears at the top of every SharePoint site. Beyond typing a simple keyword, SharePoint supports a rich query syntax that gives you precise control over what the engine returns.
Exact phrase search
Entering two words without quotes returns content containing either word. To search for an exact phrase, wrap it in quotation marks:
"Annual Report"
This instructs the search engine to find only content where those two words appear together as a string.
Wildcard search
Use the asterisk (*) to match any characters that follow a stem. For example, to find documents beginning with Quarter regardless of whether the full word is Quarterly or Quarters:
Quarter*
You can combine wildcards with phrase search to match a known first word followed by any word beginning with a given letter:
"Quarterly R*"
Including and excluding terms
Use the + symbol to require a word in every result, and the - symbol to exclude results that contain a specific word:
Annual Reports +Marketing "Product Marketing" -internal
Boolean operators
SharePoint supports the standard Boolean operators for compound queries:
| Operator | Behaviour | Example |
|---|---|---|
AND |
Both conditions must be true | Budget AND Marketing |
OR |
Either condition can be true | Budget OR Finance |
NOT |
Excludes matching content | Budget NOT Draft |
Parentheses let you group expressions and combine multiple conditions into a single query:
("For Dummies" OR Reports) AND (location:"Pacific Northwest" OR author:"Rosemarie Withee")
Proximity search — NEAR and ONEAR
The NEAR operator returns content where two terms appear within a specified number of words of each other. The default proximity is eight words when no number is specified:
"sales" NEAR(5) "China"
The ONEAR operator works identically but also enforces word order — the first term must appear before the second:
"sales" ONEAR(5) "China"
Synonyms — the WORDS operator
The WORDS operator tells the search engine that two or more terms carry the same meaning, improving result ranking for both:
WORDS(CA, California)
Without this operator, content containing only CA might rank lower than content containing both CA and California, even if it is more relevant.
Refining Search Results
After submitting a query, the results page displays matching content with thumbnail previews for Office documents and other previewable file types. Refiner buttons at the top of the results page let you filter results by content type or by the date content was last modified.
Filtering by last modified date is one of the most practical refiners available. Large SharePoint environments accumulate stale content over time, and date-based filtering helps surface recently updated documents ahead of older, less relevant results.
Configuring Query Rules
Query rules allow site administrators to control how the search engine responds to specific queries. You can use them to promote results to the top of the page and add result blocks — parallel searches that appear alongside the main results.
Query rules set in Site Settings > Search > Query Rules affect only the current site. Rules set in Site Collection Administration > Search Query Rules apply to every site in the site collection. Choose the appropriate scope before creating a rule.
Step 1 — Open Manage Query Rules
- Click the Settings gear icon in the top-right corner of the site.
- Select Site Contents, then click Site Settings.
- Under the Search section, click Query Rules.
Step 2 — Set the result source
- On the Manage Query Rules page, open the Result Source drop-down list.
- Select Local SharePoint Results (Service) to scope the rule to local site content.
Step 3 — Create the query rule
- Click New Query Rule.
- Enter a descriptive name in the Rule Name field.
- In the Query Conditions section, enter the trigger terms separated by semicolons. For example:
new employee; onboarding
Step 4 — Add a promoted result
- Click Add Promoted Result.
- Enter a Title, the URL of the content you want to promote, and an optional Description.
- Click Save.
The promoted result appears pinned at the top of the results page whenever a user searches for any of the trigger terms.
Step 5 — Add a result block (optional)
- Click Add Result Block.
- Enter a Title for the block and configure the query terms you want the block to run in parallel.
- Click OK, then click Save to save the full query rule.
A result block runs a second query and surfaces the results in a distinct section alongside the main results — useful when your users search with one term but your content uses a different term for the same concept.
Changes to query rules do not take effect immediately. The search engine must reindex site content first. To force reindexing, go to Site Settings > Search and Offline Availability and click Reindex Site.
Testing Query Rules
On the Manage Query Rules page, use the built-in query tester to verify which rules will fire for a given search term before your users encounter them. Select Promoted Results Contains, enter your trigger terms, and confirm the expected rules appear in the results.
Summary
SharePoint search is a platform, not a switch. Using the query syntax options covered in this article — phrases, wildcards, Boolean operators, proximity operators, and synonyms — users can find content with far greater precision than a simple keyword search allows. As a site administrator, query rules give you the ability to continuously improve the search experience by promoting authoritative content and surfacing related results, all without requiring any changes to the underlying documents or site structure.
