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Search box settings on SharePoint sites

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One of the several ways Microsoft Search can be customized on SharePoint sites is to tailor how the search box in the suite navigation bar works in SharePoint sites to best fit your needs.

For other customization options, see Changing the Microsoft Search results page to add custom verticals, result types and layouts, and Creating a custom search results page.

Note

The suite navigation bar search box is not available for all customers at this time, but these options can still be set now and they will take effect when it becomes available.

For the tasks listed below, you use PowerShell with SharePoint PnP PowerShell extensions. You can install and learn more about how to get started here. You sign into your site or site collection using this command:

Connect-PnPOnline -Url <yoursiteurl> -UseWebLogin
# this will prompt you to sign into your site. Use the site owner credentials

When you create a new site in SharePoint Online today, and type into the search box, you're taken to the Microsoft Search results page. By default the result page shows results from your current site. You can expand the scope of your search to the hub that the current site is associated with, if associated to one, or to the whole organization.

The scope the search box uses, by default, depends on type of site.

  • Regular sites search over the current site.
  • Hub sites search over all sites in the hub.
  • Home sites search over all content.

In some cases, you may want to change these defaults to always search over the whole organization, or across the hub a site is associated with, without needing an additional click.

As a site owner, you can change these defaults using the following command:

Set-PnPSearchSettings -SearchScope Tenant
# DefaultScope | Hub | Site | Tenant

After running this command, the site that was previously showing results from the current site by default will start to show results from the whole organization.

To go back to the default setting, run the command again with the value “DefaultScope". To search across the Hub, use “Hub” as the SearchScope value.

This setting applies at the individual site level. There's no equivalent setting for site collections.

You can choose to hide the suite navigation bar search box if you want to prevent your users from searching or to use a custom search box implementation.

To change search box visibility for a given site use this command:

Set-PnPSearchSettings -Scope Web -SearchBoxInNavBar Hidden
# Hidden | Inherit

Alternately, if you want to set it for all the sites in a site collection, you can use this command:

Set-PnPSearchSettings -Scope Site -SearchBoxInNavBar Hidden
# Hidden | Inherit

After running these commands, the search box will no longer show up in the navigation bar on top of your page. To go back to showing the search box, run the commands again with the value provided to "SearchBoxInNavBar" parameter to “Inherit”.

There are several points to consider:

  • This setting only applies to the search box in the suite navigation bar. It doesn't apply to search boxes that are in the page, or to search boxes on classic pages.

  • Once you disable the search box in the navigation bar, if you want search functionality in your site, you have to provide it yourself using a custom web part or a SharePoint Framework extension.

  • This solution removes the search box from lists and libraries for your site as well. Your custom search solution needs to consider contextual searches for SharePoint lists and libraries, in addition to site-wide search.

  • When you hide the search box for the root site of your domain, the search box is also hidden for the SharePoint start page.

You can change the hint the search box shows for a given site or site collection. The hint text is the text that appears in the search box before they start typing into it. A custom hint text may help guide your users about what to expect from search if you configure a custom results page or changed behavior of search in other ways.

Note

To be able to make this change, you need to allow running custom scripts on the site in question as a tenant administrator, which is disallowed by default. Please see Allow or prevent custom script for details. You can allow running custom scripts, make the change, and then revert to disallowing scripts for the site if necessary.

To change this setting for a given site run the following command:

Set-PnPSearchSettings -Scope Web -SearchBoxPlaceholderText "my placeholder"

Alternately, if you want to set it for all the sites in a site collection, you can use this command:

Set-PnPSearchSettings -Scope Site -SearchBoxPlaceholderText "my placeholder"

To go back to the default placeholder text, set the value to be blank ("").

Guest user limitations

The scenario intent of inviting a guest to a SharePoint site or hub site is to share content from that scopes to the guest. Setting the SearchScope to Tenant will be overridden for a guest user, and the experience reverts to the default behavior for the site. Exposing guests to organization wide results can lead to unintended oversharing of content.

Also see Guest user limitations for Create a custom search results page in SharePoint Online.