In our SharePoint Online tenant, we use multiple site collections for teams and other collaborations. We want to make those site collections available via a search page on a site in the root site collection. Because we're talking about a few hundred sites, we want to make it possible to filter the sites by the first letter of the sitename. For now, we're using the following query:
Title:letter*
The problem with this query, is that it gives us the sites with a title where one of the words begins with the given letter (so not just the site where the first word of the sitename begins with the letter). Even better, in some cases it gives us sites that doesn't contain the given letter at all. I've already been searching on the internet a bit for other solutions and I came across the following suggestion:
Search refiner on first letter of the title
I tried to apply method 2. I did manage to create a refinement filter that only showed the first letters of the filter options, but not in the way I wanted. For example, when we get the results Administration, Accounting, Production and Sales, the refinement panel shows the following filter options:
Title
A
A
P
S
So the question is; in what way should the given method be implemented to work in the correct way?
Moreover, if somebody knows an other way to make it possible to filter on the first letter of the complete sitename, I appreciate it if you could share it with us.