The settings under the Property Settings heading of the Search Tab Configuration page manage each of the various types of custom properties used by Search & Preview. In most cases, the custom properties used by Search & Preview map directly to managed properties established in SharePoint (which, themselves, usually map directly to a column of metadata stored for each document in the search database). See also “Introduction to Custom Properties” for more information about custom properties.
Figure: The search tab configuration page
The entries available under the Property Settings heading are described in the sections below.
Searchable Properties
Searchable properties enable you to include metadata search fields in your advanced search form. For example, you could design a search form that provides input fields for specifying document author, status, date, etc., respectively.
See “Custom Properties in Search Forms” for details about how to set up searchable properties using the settings provided by this entry.
Search Result Properties
Search-result properties enable you to display metadata values in your search-result listings. Search & Preview is always able to display common types of metadata such as document title and URL, but you might also decide to include other types of metadata that are specific for your SharePoint installation. Common examples of these include document author, date and status, etc.
See “Custom Properties in Search Results” for details about how to set up search-result properties using the settings provided by this entry.
Grouping Properties
Grouping properties enable you to display search results that are grouped according to some common metadata value. Documents are then ranked by relevance within each group. For example, you might group documents so that all documents of a given type (e.g., Microsoft Word) are grouped together in the search results.
See “Grouping Properties” for details about how to set up grouping properties using the settings provided by this entry.
Sorting Properties
Sorting properties enable you to provide controls that allow users to sort results according to values of a given custom property for each document. By default, documents are sorted by relevance, which is calculated at search time for each document by the SharePoint search engine (values depend on the submitted query). By configuring additional sorting properties, you might enable users to change the result list to sort documents by date, author, document type, department or any other property.
See “Sorting Properties” for details about how to set up sorting properties using the settings provided by this entry.
Refiner Properties
The Search & Preview refiner feature enables users to fine-tune their search results by filtering them according to a selected metadata value. For example, if you start by making a simple search and get a large result set, you might choose to filter the results so that they only include documents published by a specific department at your organization.
This is somewhat like providing an extra searchable property that can be specified after the initial search, except that the refiner controls will only show properties and values that are relevant for the existing result list. For example, if the initial search only returned Word and Excel documents, then the refiner control would only list these two options for the document-type refiner filter, even though the database might also contain other types of documents.
Each type of metadata that you would like to make available for this feature must be configured as a refiner property for each relevant search-tab configuration.
See “Refiner Properties” for details about how to set up refiner properties using the settings provided by this entry.
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