Bookmarks in Microsoft Search

[Updated: Oct 30, 2020]

With the introduction of Microsoft Search in Office 365, we have more and more new features released. In this series, I’m going to introduce these basic, out-of-the-box configuration and customization options.

The first thing that everyone has to know about is the Bookmarks and Q&A. Let me show you what these are.

Administering Microsoft Search

To start working with Microsoft Search Administration, follow these steps:

1. Go to Microsoft 365 Admin Center (tenant administration).
2. Click on “Show All…” to expand all settings and configuration options on the left side menu.
3. Open Settings / Search & Intelligence.

You’ll find all the available settings and insights for Microsoft Search here.

Microsoft Search roles

In Office 365, there are the following roles who can manage and administer Microsoft Search:

• Tenant Administrator: can administer every feature and setting of Microsoft Search.
• Microsoft Search Administrator: can administer every feature and setting of Microsoft Search.
• Microsoft Search Editor: can add/edit/delete Bookmarks, Locations, Q&A, etc.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks can be considered as the new, “modern” way to create promoted results.

The bookmarks are displayed in SharePoint, Office.com, as well as Bing if the query matches any of the keywords (“search” here, see more details below):

A few practical use cases when bookmarks can be useful:

• Apps like timesheet, travel expenses, etc.
• Forms and templates.
• Policies, procedures, and guidelines.
• Keywords in the organization’s glossary.
• Etc.

Creating Bookmarks

Each bookmark has a few default settings:

• Title: The title of your bookmark.
• URL: The URL where the bookmark points to.
• Bookmark description: Free text description of the bookmark.
• Keywords: Search terms commonly used, to trigger the bookmark to be displayed.
• Reserved keywords: Must be unique. If a reserved keyword is matched, it will override all other keywords. If you want to make sure that this shows up for a particular keyword, make that a reserved keyword.

Bookmarks also have several advanced settings, to further enrich user targeting (which users should see the bookmarks, when, from which device, etc.):

• Dates
• Country or region
• Groups
• Device & OS
• Targeted variations

Last but not least (one of my favorite ones): we can also display PowerApps as bookmark. (I’m planning to write a separate blog post about this option later, as this can make search even more powerful!)

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In this series

• Search options in Office 365
• Q&A in Microsoft Search
• How to deploy PnP Modern Search Web Parts

Stay tuned, more to come later as we have more and more options in Microsoft Search.