If you use Office 365, you must also know the feeling of confusion when it comes to the various Search experiences. We still have the classic search center, but also more and more modern search experiences.
Sounds exciting, but in practice, it can be very confusing.
When to use which one?
How to explain to the end users?
Understanding the user interfaces, and the processes behind is essential.
Unfortunately, Microsoft communicates only the excitement but hasn’t provided any overview so far which could help eliminate the confusion.
Let me help with that – by summarizing my real-world, unbiased experiences.
First of all: The primary motivations of searching
During my experiences, I’ve found that there are four main patterns of information seeking:
1) “I know what I’m searching for and I know how to find it.”
This behavior can be supported by Search applications.
2) “I know what I am searching for, but I don’t know how to do that.”
In this case, what the user needs help with is to Find the proper information.
3) “I don’t know what I am searching for.”
What this user needs is Discovery.
4) “Am I searching?…”
A classic use case for Search-Driven Applications.
To learn more about these patterns, please read my former blog post here: Information Seeking Patterns
Classic search experience
The “classic” search experience can be found in SharePoint on-prem as well as in Office 365. Its official name is “Search Center”, and provides results from the search index.
This means we do have full control on the searchable (and findable) content. We can:
- filter out what’s not needed;
- define what results to be displayed (result sources)
- define what facets (refiners) to be used;
- customize the user experience, by display templates;
- use SharePoint search query rules to promote or boost results, as well as to modify the query.
These user interface customizations make possible to provide branded and unified experience.
Classic search experience can support Search (1) and Search-Driven Apps (4) from the list above.
Modern search experience
“Modern” search experiences have been popping up in Office 365 for a while (but they’re not available on-prem).
They provide new ways of displaying relevant content, moreover, suggesting what is supposed to be useful to the current user. It is possible by Microsoft Graph, which provides the content to be presented by these user interfaces.
Thanks to the way the Graph provides its content, the experience is always personalized. What I can see is suggested based on my previous activities and relationships. Anyone and everyone else in the organization will see a different set of content in a different order. Because everything I see is presented to me – and everything they see is presented to them.
At the same time, we don’t have real control on what is in the Graph, hence what’s displayed to our users. Of course, everything is security trimmed, and privacy is also fully respected, but what content is in the Graph is out of our control.
Also, we cannot define how the items are displayed, since the modern search experience UI is not customizable.
These modern search applications obviously don’t provide the same “controlled” search experience as the classic search center does. But this doesn’t mean they are useless! Moreover – they do have a very well defined place in the toolkit of every information worker: these modern search experiences help us to get back what we’ve been working on recently, to find content even if we don’t know how to find it. And also, to discover content, that we might not even know about.
Conclusions
To conclude, here is a table that summarizes both experiences:
Having both the classic and the modern experiences in Office 365 has unquestinnable benefits. However, it’s also true that this mix might be, and probably is confusing for most of us. But if you know these characteristics and how they work behind the scenes, it’s much easier to understand why they provide the content the way they do.
I’m not saying it’s not confusing anymore – but maybe makes more sense.
I truly wish Microsoft brings these experiences closer to each other, and the end result will be a clear, straightforward modern search experience for all.
Hello, this is a great article, thank you. I have an issue where my modern search from the homepage is returning 0 results but the classic search works as expected. Since they use the same result set I’m having a hard time figuring out why. I’m thinking it may be permissions but honestly I’m stumped. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Brad,
Permissions on the content must be ok as results show up in classic result set.
What I would check is:
– Does Delve work?
– Have you the Office Graph enabled on your tenant? Go to tenand admin / SharePoint admin / settings, and there you’ll find a setting “Allow access to Office Graph (default)”.
If everything is allowed, drop me an email and I’m happy to help troubleshoot further.
-Agnes
Great summary Agnes – and illustration to the optional confusion for end-users and search admin.
It would be great if one could work more with models/semantics (taxonomies, ontologies and controlled vocabularies) to minimize linguistic insecurity – disambiguate concepts with the Microsoft Graph, connecting people and content with meaning.
If this would be an route for future development of the people in Redmont/Oslo – new emerging UI really could augment the user experience and support all four dimensions to information seeking patterns.
Hi Agnes,
indeed, this option is available for the modern search experience when searching in a list or library. But when searching directly from a modern Sitepage, this option isn’t available at all… This makes me a little hesitant in using modern (home)pages for teamsites, since I want to at least have the option to use metadata to filter results (ie. switch to classic search) if I cant seam to find what I’m looking for. Or am I overlooking something?
Bouke, do you mean this?
https://searchexplained.com/how-to-get-to-the-classic-search-ui-from-a-modern-page-in-office-365/
Great overview! When working with the modern experience/teamsites, there doesn’t seem to be an option other than using the new search experience. Or is this configurable?
No, there is no way to configure it. The only thing you can use (and educate your users to) is the “Show more results” link on the very bottom of the page – which redirects to the classic search results.
But there’s no “hybrid” UI yet.
Useful
Great overview, thank you!