I'm seeing some weird stuff going on with refining search results in SharePoint Online.
I've got a search results webpart set-up which returns items of a specific content type. Alongside it is a refiner web part which refines the results based on a managed metadata field set on those items. In this case, the refiner values are countries. There is no search box on the page as I just want it to show everything and let the users refine based on what they are looking for (requirement by the customer).
When refining, the following happens:
- Selecting "Netherlands" returns 9 results.
- Selecting "Belgium" returns 8 (different!) results.
- Selecting both Netherlands and Belgium returns 10 results, the 8 Belgium ones and 2 from Netherlands.
So search now 'lost' 7 results tagged with Netherlands. Why?
With a different combination:
- Selecting 'Algeria' returns 3 results.
Selecting 'Netherlands' and 'Algeria' returns 11 results, 8 tagged with Netherlands and the 3 from Algeria.
Selecting 'Belgium' and 'Algeria' returns 11 results, the correct ones!
I have trouble explaining (and fixing) this. In my opinion, selecting multiple refiners would result in an OR-type query, returning all results tagges with either of the values. By the way, all of the items are tagged with a single value, so they always belong to a single country. If this was an AND query, it should return nothing at all.