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I would like to know if there is any difference in querying the taxonomy field by term id vs term label.

When a managed metadata field is crawled, it creates 2 crawled properties -

  1. ows_taxid_fieldname (which is automatically mapped to a managed
    property "owstaxidfieldname" and contains the term id)
  2. ows_fieldname (This contains the term label)

I can either query by owstaxidfieldname like owstaxidfieldname:#guid. But this requires term id. Other way is to use the mapped property of ows_fieldname and query using the term label.

I'm using the advanced search webpart to query on the managed field. Since the end user wouldn't know the Term GUID, I have mapped the text field so that user can search against the term label.

Is there any performance implication in using a term id managed property vs text field?

1 Answer 1

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This is a matter of opinion, but basically many people who delve deeply into search would tell you to put it against the term label.

But I know some people don't agree. Performance wise, it's a hard one to judge, if you include the value in the index, it's indexed and I don't think that the guids are stored using a hashing algorithm, so it would be a fair game, if anything the labels are shorter so index matching would be a little quicker.

But that part is just thoery on my part.

Source: I did have a great source for this, explaining how to map managed metadata more efficiently and how to better your search results leveraging them. But I can't find it, if I do I will update this post with the information.

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  • Thanks Hugh. If you can find that article would be helpful.
    – Rajesh
    Oct 29, 2012 at 10:57
  • Does using term label require a full crawl of the content? I did an incremental crawl, then I created a managed property and mapped to ows_fieldname(text) crawled property. When I searched using the term label I did not get any results. When I queried using owstaxid field using the term guid, I did get results. I then did a full crawl and searched again using the term label and I got the results this time. Does this mean a full crawl is required after creating of the managed property for the term label? This is a big limitation as the full crawl would take couple of days in production.
    – Rajesh
    Oct 29, 2012 at 11:16
  • Yes a full crawl would be required, since you need to make a new set of data and you aren't updating existing data.
    – Hugh Wood
    Oct 29, 2012 at 13:54
  • Thanks again. Is this a limitation with the managed property mapped to term label? Managed properties for term ids i.e. owstaxidfield gets created automatically and works with incremental crawl.
    – Rajesh
    Oct 29, 2012 at 16:55
  • It's a limitation when adding a new field that needs to be indexed pretty much. New mappings need to be made. The same would happen if you added a new custom field and wanted to index it.
    – Hugh Wood
    Oct 29, 2012 at 17:28

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