Making Microsoft Search Results Your Own With Custom Verticals

Although Microsoft Search is one of the most advanced internal search engines ever developed, even the best engines can be overwhelmed with all the data and content that exists in a typical organization. As with previous SharePoint-centric search solutions, Microsoft continues to make enhancements that help organizations sift through content and that give end users a more streamlined search experience. 

This second article of the series explores another facet of Microsoft Search: custom verticals. Administrators can use custom verticals to deliver a more precise, context-specific search experience. This helps end users refine and direct their searches within specific content, datasets, locations, and patterns. For my first article in the series, see Making Microsoft Search Results Your Own With Answers. 

Initially only offered to customers who’ve implemented Graph Connectors in Microsoft Search, custom verticals have expanded to target SharePoint structure and content as well. For those familiar with search scopes or result sets in the SharePoint classic search experience, verticals are their natural replacement, with the same flexibility and scalability to meet most organizational needs.

 Using Custom Verticals in Microsoft Search

Using custom verticals in an organizational search strategy is one of the more straightforward implementations inside Microsoft Search. Although easier to implement than many other search components, it still takes solid planning to implement verticals that are robust and useful to end users. The true magic of custom verticals is their ability to narrow down the scope of search results to target unique findability needs and to provide a more tailored search process. 

In planning the verticals, an organization must understand employee needs and determine how best to create a targeted results query. Much of the effort is trial and error. Administrators and search experts have to identify how to return results that offer the greatest opportunity for success. Although there are many ways to decide what kind of verticals to create for maximum benefit, here’s a short list of starting points:

• Review Microsoft Search and SharePoint classic search logs to analyze what people are searching for, including what searches are successful. Learning from search successes and failures helps to reveal verticals that can provide immediate benefit.
• Identify people in the organization who own processes that are managed inside SharePoint or Teams sites. Study their typical search needs and determine how a custom vertical could support their day-to-day work.
• Perform search workshops with organizational stakeholders and end users to understand findability pain points and to see how more customized results could help.

After identifying a custom vertical (or verticals), administrators must decide how to narrow overall search results in scope to target the specific content. Below is a brief list of criteria to determine the correct query:

• Does all the content exist in certain locations? This could be content in a SharePoint site, library, list, or individual folders.
• Does the content have elements that are similar? This could include similar words in the content, naming structures, types of documents, custom metadata, or ownership. If there's a piece of data that is stored about content in your SharePoint environment, it will most likely help narrow down results.
• Does the content support an organizational process? This could include departmental processes, HR-related activities, or leadership initiatives. Creating custom verticals that support specific internal functions can be a significant way to increase overall search success.

After identifying custom verticals and determining the necessary metadata to query, admins can begin the creation process. They can manage verticals and other key search components at the Global Administration and SharePoint site level. Although global admins can create custom verticals that target use across the entire organization, site and hub-specific administrators can create verticals that target specific business needs and a subset of end users.

Administrators have an easy-to-use interface to create custom verticals. Here’s a video walkthrough of the step-by-step creation process.

Important Caveats

Although custom verticals can be an important part of an organization’s overall search strategy, there are important aspects to consider during implementation that may affect decision-making:

• Custom verticals only target SharePoint and Graph Search Connector content. Although being able to target other content (such as Teams conversations) will eventually happen, the current scope is limited.
• There is no way to evaluate queries or filters during the creation process. Unlike SharePoint classic search, where administrators could test queries while building, testing will need to occur by deploying live and by testing against live data. This could cause issues for some organizations because end users will not be restricted from using unvetted verticals.
• After admins create and enable a custom vertical, there is no consistent timing on when the vertical will become available to the search experience. Often it can take up to 24 hours before the new vertical appears. This can cause challenges for organizations, especially during initial deployment and testing. A vertical that is not working must be edited and redeployed, with a potential 24-hour waiting period between each iteration.

Although some of these challenges may seem significant, the benefits of custom verticals largely outweigh the potential downsides. Organizations that follow a sound planning process, understand what their people need, and create well targeted verticals have the best opportunity for increased search success.