SharePoint Online Search - Add Site Title Refiner to Classic Search

Question

Want to add a refiner for "Site Title" on SharePoint Online Classic Search Center (as it is not possible to add refiners to SharePoint Online Modern Search "Microsoft Search").

Given is a Hybrid Search Scenario with SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2016 on prem. All results are in one big index. All items from SP 2016 on prem as well as SPO are available in the search results.

Added Crawled Property "ows_sitename" to Managed Property "refinableString00" as you would do on prem as well. Waited 24h.

As added "refinableString00" to the Search Refiner in SharePoint Online it now shows Site Titles to refine -> but just Site Titles from on prem SharePoint. The Crawled Property "ows_sitename" seems to be empty for SharePoint Online results.

Any ideas to accomplish that task or to further debug this to see what's broken?

Answer 1

First: There is not really much we can do to troubleshoot this issue since there are no logs to look into in SharePoint Online. Since the refiner works for SharePoint on-premise search results, I think you have done the configuration without error.

Second: It might take longer than you think for the custom refiner to take effect in SharePoint Online.

True Story: I once tested with couple of custom refiners in SPO same as on SharePoint server, and it never showed up. So I came into the conclusion that this feature is no longer available in SPO. But a moment ago I went to test for this case, I saw the refiners popped on results.aspx.