Search on Enterprise Keywords

Question

I have added an enterprise keywords column to my document library and added a custom tag of 'RandomDocTag' to a document.

I assumed that this would be indexed by the search engine, but I found nothing by searching for 'RandomDocTag' - ok so i assumed i might have to wait for the crawl, but it is now months since I set that value and I still get no results when using search.

Any ideas? Is this not a 'managed property'? and if not does that mean I need to map it to one?

Am i right to assume that we should be able to search for the keywords that get tagged in the Enterprise Keywords column?

Answer 1

I would navigate to Central Administration and open the Search Service Application. Go to Search Schema, then Crawled Properties. See if you can locate the crawled property of the enterprise keyword column; then check and see if there is a Managed Property associated with the crawled property. This is a good tutorial on configuring Enterprise Keywords and an associated Managed Property. https://sharepoint.rackspace.com/search-tutorial Also ensure that none of the documents are in "Draft" status: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2304855. Otherwise, the content will not be crawled.

Answer 2

As addition to question asked, and root cause being draft documents not indexed. Consider draft documents to be also indexed (an often missed setting in SharePoint and confusing to creators/users that work with drafts and cannot find their documents).

This behavior can be altered in Document Library Settings > Versioning Settings > Draft Item Security.

Select the option Any user who can read items.

This will allow all users to see draft items including the crawling account.

Note that this needs to be carefully considered on a case by case basis, as read access to drafts is not always desired.