SharePoint and Office365 search are getting some amazing enhancements and new features coming soon to you.
Announced at Microsoft Ignite, some of the new features that are coming to your search experience:
Personalized Search
Powered by the power of the Microsoft Graph, Personalized Search, will provide promoted results that are personalized based on what you do, who you work with and what data you have been viewing to find and present the most relative content to you when you need it most.
Search will now include list items in all search experiences and not only in the enterprise results. This allows for all content within a SharePoint site to be included in your search and not just what had been available in the Enterprise Search Center.
The search results page is getting a much-needed facelift allowing for the new results views, scopes and identification of types of files and content more accessible and easier to consume.
The new personalized search experience and search results page along with the new SharePoint Home Page are expected to roll out by end of year.
Search is now coming to Windows
It can be difficult to remember where you placed a document you were working on. Is it stored locally, in OneDrive or SharePoint? The new experiences coming to Windows will allow for search to be able to search all of your locations to find everything from email, to documents and more throughout all environments you work in.
Bing for Business is Getting Personal
I admit I am not a big Bing user, but some of the new capabilities coming shortly might just get me to change my perspective.
Powered by AI and the Microsoft Graph, when a search is performed, it will now be able to bring back results regarding both internal and external content. Bring able to perform a search and bring back a person or content that lives within my organization can help me to save time on opening multiple browsers and access content important to me faster and more efficiently.
Images are now Searchable
Probably one of my favorite features coming to search is the ability for search images by the kind of content they may contain. Currently, if I wanted an image to come back in search, I had to make sure that a decryption of that image was in metatdata or in the title and even then, it may not always be correct
Search will now be able to determine what kind content exist in the image and be able to surface the correct images in a search!
I am amazed by how far Microsoft has been able to come with bringing value back to a platform that I have loved and being able to condense and improve my experiences and how I work on a daily basis. The future is indeed bright.