Browse all topics▾
All guidesGlossary
SharePoint & OneDrive

SharePoint search and Microsoft Search

How search works in Microsoft 365 — what gets indexed, what users see, and how to make results better.

Search in Microsoft 365 went from "SharePoint Search" to "Microsoft Search" around 2019. The underlying index is shared across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Outlook, and Bing-at-work, and the user-facing surface is the same search box across the apps. Knowing how it works helps both users and admins.

What's indexed

Microsoft Search indexes:

  • SharePoint sites and pages — content, metadata, columns.
  • Files in SharePoint and OneDrive — including full-text content for supported file types.
  • Teams messages and channel content.
  • Outlook mailboxes (a user's own mail, primarily).
  • People — names, titles, departments, skills, hierarchy from Entra ID.
  • Conversations and Loop components.
  • Optional third-party connectors — Jira, ServiceNow, GitHub, file shares, and more — via Microsoft Graph connectors.

Each user's search results are personalised and trimmed to their permissions: you only see what you can already access.

  • The search box at the top of Microsoft 365 apps (SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Office apps, Bing-at-work).
  • The SharePoint search results page for a site or hub.
  • The Microsoft Search browser address bar (bing.com signed in with a work account).

Results are unified — files, messages, and people show up in one list, with verticals for files, people, sites, etc.

How admins influence results

Admins control search through the Search & Intelligence admin centre (admin.microsoft.com/search):

  • Answers: predefined answers for known questions (e.g. "VPN" surfaces the VPN page).
  • Bookmarks, Q&A, and acronyms.
  • Locations: known office addresses.
  • Promoted results and verticals.

For larger or external sources, Graph connectors bring third-party content into the index.

Improving result quality

A few practical levers:

  • Title and description metadata on SharePoint pages matter — they're what shows in results.
  • Sensitivity labels and retention ensure old, stale content isn't promoted forever.
  • Site hub associations define search scopes: a search from a hub searches across all associated sites.
  • Search analytics show what users searched for and which results they clicked — use this to seed bookmarks and answers.

For Copilot tenants, search quality directly affects Copilot quality. Stale, mis-titled, or mis-permissioned content shows up in answers.