Sharepoint 2010 search - ignore a column

Question

We have a sharepoint 2010 branding site that uses search. The search works just fine, but our client has come back and requested that the content author not be included in the search. This is a fair request - but I can't seem to remove the author from the crawl index.

I tried central admin > search admin > meta data property mappings

I edited the 'author' property and unchecked it's inclusion in scopes. No luck there. I also removed the mappings to crawled properties. No luck there.

Are there other meta data properties that I need to exclude, or am I going about this in the wrong way?

And yes, I've done a full crawl after these attempts.

Answer 1

I see that this is an old post but I can share from my experience and hopefully someone will find it helpful. I had the same issue whereby searching for an author's name brought back way more results than what was relevant for a public facing site.

I found that there were other crawled properties that had names in them, for example, "ows__CheckinComment". Using PowerShell, I went through all the crawled properties that were included in the index and removed them if I thought they had author information in them. After removing them from the index, I had to reset the index and do a full crawl.

Other examples are AssignedTo, CreatedBy, and Email but there could be more.

This article shows you how to do it with FAST but there are similar commands for the OOTB search. Try running this in PowerShell to get some of the commands:

get-command -noun *search*prop*

Hopefully this works for you.

Answer 2

I usually customize the results web part to hide the fields i don't want displayed. Core results xsl is normally where i start.

UPDATE

Have you tried reseting the index rather than just doing a full crawl

There are differences: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointsearch/thread/ad53918a-2069-4281-ac31-431081bfe515

Answer 3

Use "ExludeFromSummary" managed property. This post explains you how to do use it, http://www.ableblue.com/blog/archive/2011/11/10/find-me-but-dont-show-me/

Answer 4

The SharePoint search engine indexes properties such as "Author" (which you've already resolved), but just like Google, it also indexes the text of a page. That is why this issue is occurring. So, some things to try.

If author needs to show on the page but not in the search results:

Wrap the author field in your page layout with <div class="noindex"> and </div>. That should ensure certain content on the page is not indexed (see Mark Arend's blog for more).

If author is not shown on the page but is still in the search results:

This is SharePoint doing what it sees as its job of being a good Content Management System (in this context). Of course it thinks the author should be included in the indexed text of the page so it's doing that behind the scenes 'to help'.

Now on something like a page layout, you have control over what's displayed, where and when. However search results (as you would have seen from looking at the HTML for the page) always come back as "Hello this is my page. Domain\ScottE etc..." and there is no structure. It's just a plain dump of text.

So, the only way you can resolve this is by going custom code and writing an HTTP module. This is a piece of code that executes after SharePoint has rendered the HTML but before it is displayed to the user. It gives you complete control to alter the output of that HTML.

The code in this module needs to look at perhaps the URL or some other HTML on the page and check if it's a search results page. If so, then it needs to execute a regular expression over the page to remove anything of the form Domain\ScottE. This needs to be as specific as possible to ensure no other comment is removed. Here's a similar example.

If, however, authors are not shown in a pattern that can be matched, unfortunately this is an impossible task. There is no way to recognise a name from any other piece of text. So unless you can come up with some other rule, this is not possible.

Answer 5

I needed to do the same. Therefor I excluded everything in the people category in => Central Administration:SearchServiceApplication: Metadata Property Mappings