How to Turn Off a Query Rule?

Recently I’ve got a question by chat here on our website, and after responding it there I thought I’d share the detailed response here as well. The question was: how to turn off a Query Rule on a page in SharePoint (on-prem or online)?

Result Sources

As mentioned in the question, a Query Rule is always assigned to a Result Source. Therefore, if you don’t want to use a Query Rule in your Result Set, one way to implement this is to create a new Result Source, and not to define any Query Rules.

 

If you use this approach, you also have to edit the Result Set web part to use the new, “no-query-rule” Result Source to display results from.

Disable Query Rules on the Result Set web part

If you edit the Result Set web part, there are further options, too.

Open the Query Builder by clicking on “Change Query”, then switch to the “Settings” tab. Here you can find a radio button which is set to “Use Query Rules”.

By switching this to “Don’t use Query Rules”, you can disable every Query Rule on this web part – therefore the people results will not be displayed in the publishing pages result set, for example.

 

I hope this helps.

 

If you have any questions you want me to answer, please don’t hesitate to use the chat window in the bottom right corner.