Dear Microsoft: Please Fix the Search & Intelligence Center, Which Gives Us Only Minimal Insights

Last week, we had a client wondering why they saw this in the Search & Intelligence Admin Center.

Not only was Top queries showing “No data”, but there was “No data” for No results queries and Abandoned queries, too. This was the case even when we changed the filter from the last 31 days to the last 12 months. Surely people were searching for something!

We decided to try putting in a ticket with Microsoft to find out why it wasn’t working. At least it wasn’t working in such a way where we could get any “intelligence” from it.

After about a week, I finally got past the first line of defense at Microsoft (who told me to try a different account, etc. – nothing useful) to find out why we weren’t seeing much in the Search & intelligence stats. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t a good one.

It seems like the search queries are generated only when the searches are made on the Sharepoint Landing Page and not within the Sharepoint site search. Here is the information for your reference.

“You can get the tenant level usage analytics reports in Microsoft Admin center under Settings> Search and Intelligence> Insights to access the 5 usage analytics reports (top queries, abandoned queries, no result queries, query volume, and Impression distribution) aggregated over SharePoint home (This only covers searches made from the SharePoint landing page) and office.com workloads.”

(And yes, he spelled SharePoint wrong.) I vaguely remember learning this from Mikael Svenson (@mikaelsvenson) long ago. I probably blocked it out of my mind.

Rereading the articles in the References section below – with a fine-toothed comb- I see the answer was there, too.

With data only coming from “SharePoint Home (the site with URL ending in /SharePoint.aspx), Office.com, and Microsoft Search in Bing work tab search boxes”, we get barely a slice of the searches people actually do, and there’s very little intelligence we can get from such narrowly scoped analytics. Now that the Microsoft 365 search box is at the top of almost every page in Microsoft 365, I’d expect we could see all the search queries people do. I’m hoping this isn’t a permanent state.

As an Intranet manager, one of the most valuable things you can know is what people are searching for. It tells you what content is missing or where you haven’t done a good job in building the navigation or other parts of the information architecture. Unfulfilled searches mean content is missing entirely or maybe the permissions aren’t set right on content which is available. Setting up search isn’t a “one and done” thing. Monitoring and mining search should be a role at every organization with electronic content. Without good tools to do so, we’re driving blind.

References

• Set up Microsoft Search | Microsoft Docs
• Search Usage Reports | Microsoft Docs