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Our index is bloated by thousands upon thousands of identical /DispForm.aspx? results, but there doesn't seem to be a way of excluding these without also excluding the content contained within the list?

It seems very strange that the wrapper of the content is returned in a search, rather than the relevant content item itself. I have read that this is 'by design', but why? Surely it would be more useful to return the actual item, rather than multiple identical and meaningless wrappers?

We see the same behaviour with /AllItems.aspx results, where the AllItems.aspx list view is returned as a result, but the list items themselves aren't, despite the "Allow items from this list to appear in search results" being set to Yes.

Adding a crawl rule to exclude either of the above looks like it would actually exclude the content items as well. Is there any way around this?

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  • Can you clarify the issue? If you have thousands of list items you will have thousands of DispForm results, one for each item. If the result appears in the AllItems view, that will be returned as a result as well. It sounds like Search is working.
    – Matthew McDermott
    Jan 4, 2014 at 14:16
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    The items are not appearing in search results themselves - only their associated DispForms. They do appear within the AllItems view, but if we search for a specific item entitled "Super Specific Title Phrase", the only result returned is DispForm.aspx. This is confusing for users, and far from ideal. Is this 'correct' SharePoint behaviour?
    – Vassal
    Jan 6, 2014 at 12:14
  • The item is the DispForm.aspx page, otherwise how d you view the item? Unless you are talking about images and video. That is handled differently in SharePoint 2013.
    – Matthew McDermott
    Jan 6, 2014 at 13:36
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    Thanks for your help Matt. Perhaps I should elaborate a bit - a lot of results actually have the title "DispForm.aspx" returned (which is where our usability concerns come in), not just the dispform.aspx?ID=123 contained in the URL. Does this only happen by default when an item has no title field?
    – Vassal
    Jan 6, 2014 at 15:10
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    YES! The issue you face is because the Title Field is blank. For result relevance and so many other reasons, the Title field is very important.
    – Matthew McDermott
    Jan 7, 2014 at 13:40

2 Answers 2

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Not really - as you mentioned it is by design, and excluding DispForm.aspx will exclude a lot of other content from your farm.

If you had specific areas you want to exclude this, you can exclude DispForm in a specific Search Scope, or exclude a specific list from being displayed in search results.

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You will see DispForm.aspx when crawled items do not have titles. Search relevance is significantly improved by quality titles for items, both list items and library items. I am not clear on how they could have removed the title field, if they did they really messed up. If changing the content type so that it has a title is not an option and you can only "recover" the content, you can teach search to use another field as the title by mapping the appropriate field from the content type to the Title managed property. (This is a better alternative to changing the search result, as the Title field is used for relevance.)

You don't have to live with someone else's mistake.

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