When working with Search, I often get the question how to set up the Search Center, and how to configure and customize its Search Pages. In this blog post, I am summarizing the basic configuration steps to follow.
Please note, these steps can be applied in SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016 on-premises as well as in Office 365 / SharePoint Online.
Setting up the Search Center
A Search Center is a site or a site collection in SharePoint, created from the Standard or Enterprise Search Center site template. Usually, I recommend to create a separate site collection, unless the explicit requirement is a sub-site somewhere in the existing site structure.
The steps are as easy as setting up any other site collections:
- In SharePoint 2013/2016, go to Central Administration / Application Management.
- In Office 365, go to Admin / SharePoint Admin Center / Site Collections.
- Then choose “Create Site Collection”
- Specify the Title and URL.
- Select the language.
- Select the template: Enterprise / Enterprise Search Center.
- Specify the site collection administrator(s) and the quota settings.
- Click OK.
Now, your new Search Center is set up and ready to be used.
Create Search Pages
By default, the Search Center contains four TABs (verticals): Everything, People, Conversations, Videos.
Each of these TABs represents a Page created in the Search Center site:
- Everything – results.aspx
- People – peopleresults.aspx
- Conversations – conversationresults.aspx
- Videos – videoresult.aspx
To edit these TABs or add new ones from existing pages, you have to edit the site’s Search Settings:
- Go to Site Settings.
- Under Search, open Search Settings.
- Scroll down to Configure Search Navigation.
Here you can add new TABs, remove them, or re-order.
If you want to add a new TAB, you have to make sure the following conditions are all true:
- The proper page does exist.
- The page is checked in.
- The page is published.
Next Steps
Once you create a search page, there are several things you can configure and customize there:
- Define what results are to be displayed (by Result Sources);
- Configure the Search Refiners;
- Customize the user experience by Display Templates;
- Set up Search Query Rules.
Please stay tuned, I’m going to discuss these topics in the upcoming parts of this series.
Hi Agnes, thanks for your reply, agreed on your comment and understand but as per my query I want to get all the versions of documents in search results and also from somewhere else I get that it’s possible with custom display template. I can easily retrieve all versions fro csom (.net managed? Console application but want to implement the same in SharePoint page. If you have any suggestions for display template or anything to achieve the requirement please let me know.
Thank you for your help and time.
I’m pretty sure there’s an API to get all the versions and then they can be displayed on the hover panel, for example, yes. I am not a developer but drop me an email please and I’ll follow-up with my dev colleagues.
Can we get all version document from search result using display template if yes can you please let me know the how can we achieve the same?
Search in SharePoint only indexes the latest major version of everything.
No minor versions, and no previous versions. For example, if the current version of a document is v3.2, search index contains v3.0. It doesn’t have v3.1, v3.2, either v2.0 or v1.0
I hope it helps.