{"id":9420,"date":"2023-01-18T07:19:56","date_gmt":"2023-01-18T15:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=9420"},"modified":"2026-02-02T13:34:46","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T21:34:46","slug":"getting-to-search-completeness-internally-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/getting-to-search-completeness-internally-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to \u2018search completeness\u2019 internally at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"
Microsoft is a big company with thousands of teams working in different ways based on the work they do. Despite that complexity, when our employees go looking for something, they expect an internal search portal that will find exactly what they\u2019re looking for instantly\u2014just like when they search on the internet. Yet when talking to these employees, each of them defines the scope of what they\u2019re looking for quite differently.<\/p>\n This blog explores the challenge of delivering the full scope of content each employee expects to find in search from their subjective view. This is what we call search completeness.<\/p>\n To start on the journey of getting to search completeness, you first must understand your user community:<\/p>\n [<\/em>Read the first blog in our series, making content more accessible and searches more efficient at Microsoft<\/em><\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n Reviewing search term frequency was one of our early steps in understanding our users. Looking at the number of times each search term was used, then looking at a sampling of those search terms made it very clear that the most common searches are for common employee actions, and that less common searches are typically persona specific. The chart below shows this well: high volume search terms that are common across most employees, and low-volume ones that tend to be org- or persona-specific.<\/p>\n Sometimes we could easily identify desired content from these popular search terms such as search terms related to documents. Microsoft.com and Stack overflow were also fairly popular.<\/p>\n Next, we realized there was a lot of content that was impossible to identify from search terms. We needed some other way of identifying desired content and found a way via Microsoft Entra ID (formerly known as Microsoft Azure Active Directory, or AAD).<\/p>\n By using its authentication volume, we are able to see the most popular registered apps within the company. Many of these are included in Microsoft Search by default. SharePoint and OneDrive are good examples. Others have their own search capability that meets user expectations and doesn\u2019t need its content included in enterprise search. Outlook is such an example. This left us with a significant volume of highly used apps whose content would be beneficial to add to enterprise search. The chart below gives you a taste of these results.<\/p>\n Gathering the list of popular apps left us with a challenge of identifying popular content that isn\u2019t defined as an app in Entra ID. We explored various ways of capturing this information but, so far, have not found any better method than user feedback and surveys.<\/p>\n The result of this work has yielded a \u201cTop 100\u201d list of content we want to add to enterprise search. So how do we go about getting this content added into our search results?<\/p>\n Microsoft Search provides a number of different methods with which to bring in all the content. Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses, which we\u2019ve summarized in the table below.<\/p>\n So now the stage is set, we know the content we want to include, we know the methods available for doing it, we just need to implement the right method in each case.<\/p>\n We also use Microsoft Viva Topics and other product capabilities, which will be discussed in a future blog post.<\/p>\n At this point, search indexing encompasses 70 percent of the Microsoft Entra ID Top Apps list, as weighted by usage volume. We expect to reach 80 percent within the next year.<\/p>\n We’ve also realized there are occasions where content should not be included in enterprise search but should be included in targeted custom search portals. The same methods described above can typically be used to support such custom portals. Our learning thus far will also be described in a future post.<\/p>\n We see some continuing challenges for which we do not yet have answers:<\/p>\n Please return to the Inside Track blog for future stories in our ongoing series on transforming search completeness here at Microsoft.<\/p>\n
We periodically update our stories, but we can\u2019t verify that they represent the full picture of our current situation at Microsoft. We leave them on the site so you can see what our thinking and experience was at the time.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

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Understanding your user community<\/h2>\n


Methods of achieving search completeness<\/h2>\n

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What we are doing<\/h2>\n
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