Finding good results in SharePoint can be confusing. That’s because the default behaviour is to search for keywords which can return more results than you expected. Here are some tips to improve your searching experience.

When you enter terms or a phrase in the search bar, Microsoft searches each of these independently as keywords. It performs a full text search of all content. So a search for external sharing will return any documents, folders, pages or sites where the words external or sharing occur. The more common the search terms, the more results you can expect.

However you can use advance techniques to create detailed queries.

• Use quotations to signify an exact phrase. For example “external sharing” will return only instances where those words are used together as a phrase
• Use Boolean operators (AND, OR)
• Use parameter operators to refine the search such as:
  
  • Filename:
  • Author:
  • Filetype:
• Use wildcards *
• Use (-) to exclude results. For example -2015 will exclude any results that contain “2015”

You can combine all of these to create a detailed query. For example a search for:

“external sharing” filetype:pdf author:Mat*

will return only pdf files where the phrase “external sharing” occurs anywhere and the creator or modifier is someone with the first or last name of Matt, Mathew, Matthews etc.

Here’s another example:

“human resources” benefits OR insurance -2015 filetype:docx author:mat*

This query searches for Word documents containing the phrase human resources plus keywords benefits or insurance, but exclude any text with 2015 and where the file was created or modified by anyone whose first or last name begins with Mat