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We have a Wiki site where we put most of our instructions / process. We are hopping to give people a way to find any instruction there.

However, we noticed that people will not search for keywords, but will ask question in the search bar such as : How do I share my Calendar. I believe that this negatively impact the search results.

I there a way to ignore the How do I from the search? I don't mean to not index that nor explicitly exclude it from the results, I mean to search like this isn't in the query.

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2 Answers 2

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You could try adding a query rule for the action term "how do I". The action term would be removed and only the remaining terms used in the query rule. The other alternative is to use RegEx.

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  • Can you elaborate? On the query rule, as an action I only see the Promoted Results, Result Block or Change the ranked results. Anyway, I am not ever sure what query condition could catch How do I if the users don;t put quotes around it. Thank you!
    – Happouh
    Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 16:49
  • Create a Result Block and use the "Action Term" option. (You can also try regex if you want to get fancy.)
    – Matthew McDermott
    Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 22:36
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    the Query rule is the right way to go. Here are the details of what I did : Create a new Query Rule with the condition : "Advanced Query Text Match / Query contains one of these phrases / Check Start of query matches, but nit entire query, Assign match to {actionTerms}, unmatch terms to {subjectTerms}. Then I added a ranked result : {subjectTerms}. That's it.
    – Happouh
    Commented Dec 12, 2016 at 16:04
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You can update the search results webpart to exclude the word 'How do I' by

  1. Go to the search results page
  2. Edit the page
  3. Edit the search result webparts
  4. Click change query
  5. Add (and -How do I) to exclude the keyword from the search see image below

enter image description here

Ref: https://www.mavention.nl/blog/exclude-external-users-search-results-office-365

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f4fcde10-341b-4e76-8806-99ab74aa7114/removing-term-from-search-office-365-sharepoint-2013?forum=sharepointsearch

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  • Thank you for your response. But I believe that this will explicitly exclude "How do I". So if a page contains "How do I" it will be excluded from the result. Also please note that the user will not add the double quote around it, therefore the rule will never be applied. If I add in the query : -how -do -I then any page with either word will be excluded. I hope it all makes sense.
    – Happouh
    Commented Dec 7, 2016 at 19:18

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