How to configure the Search Results Web Part to use a new result source in SharePoint Server

Article
01/19/2023

APPLIES TO: yes-img-13 2013 yes-img-16 2016 yes-img-19 2019 yes-img-se Subscription Edition no-img-sop SharePoint in Microsoft 365

In the previous article in this series, How to create a Search Center Site Collection and enable crawling of your content in SharePoint Server, we explained how you can create a Search Center Site Collection and enable crawling of your content. In this article, you'll learn:

How to turn off versioning for the Pages library

If you don't want to check pages in and out when you configure the Search Results Web Part, you can turn off versioning for the Pages library.

Here are the steps to turn off versioning for the Pages library:

Go to Site settings --> Site contents.
On the Site Contents page, click the Pages library.
In the Pages library, click the LIBRARY tab and then Library Settings.
On the Settings page, click Versioning settings.
On the Versioning Settings page, in the Content Approval section, for Require content approval for submitted items, select No.
In the Document Version History section, for Create a version each time you edit a file in this document library, select No versioning.
In the Require Check Out section, for Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited, select No.

Why you should consider creating a result source for your Search Center

A result source specifies where your search results can come from. For example, in our scenario, we did not want search results to come from all sites within the SharePoint farm, but only from one specific site within the farm.

The default result source in a Search Center returns search results from the complete SharePoint Server farm. If you want search results from the complete SharePoint Server farm, you can go to the next article in this series, Plan to use refiners on a search results page in SharePoint Server. But, if you want search results from only a subset within your SharePoint Server farm (in our scenario, one specific site), you should create a result source.

How to create a result source

Depending on your permission level, you create a result source on three levels:

Permission level	Where the result source will be added
Search service application administrator	To all site collections within the farm
Site collection administrator	To all sites in a site collection
Site collection owner	To a single site

To save space, we'll only show you how to create a result source as a Site collection administrator.

Go to Site settings --> Search Result Sources.
On the Manage Result Sources page, click New Result Source.
On the Add Result Source page, enter a Name. Select values for Protocol and Type, and then click Launch Query Builder. This opens a dialog.

In our scenario, we named the result source Articles , and kept the default values for Protocol and Type.
In the Build Your Query dialog, define the result source.

Remember, in our scenario we only wanted search results to come from a particular site within the farm. Therefore, in the Query text field we added the following:
```
{searchTerms?} (contentclass:sts_listitem) path:http://<path>
```
Before we move on, let's analyze what we entered:

{searchTerms?} In our result source, we wanted to include the words that users type inside the query box when then search for something. Obviously we have no way to know what users will type. Therefore, we added the {searchTerms?} query variable. By the way, you can tell it is a query variable because it is enclosed in braces (for more information, see Query variables in SharePoint Server). When a user enters a query, this query variable is replaced by the words the user has typed in the query box. The question mark at the end of the variable means that if no words are entered in the query box, the variable should be ignored.
(contentclass:sts_listitem) This means that only list items will be included in the result source.
path:http://<path>This is the path of the site from where we wanted search results to come from.

Test that the result source is working correctly by clicking the TEST tab, and then Show more.
In the {searchTerms} field, enter Query words to simulate a query entered by a user, and then click Test query.

In our scenario, we entered search configuration .

Notice that 52 results were returned. (I will tell you why this is kind of cool in the next section...).
Click OK to close the dialog, and then Save.

So now that we have a result source for the Search Center, we can move on to configuring the Search Results Web Part to use the new result source.