An intranet can be packed with news, documents, policies, manuals, and other important information, but if employees can’t find what they’re looking for, it’s ultimately of little use. This is precisely the problem many organizations face with their SharePoint intranets. The information is there, but employees don’t know where to find it. They search for a term and get a long list of results. Or they find documents from Teams, old pages, and other SharePoint environments, when all they’re really looking for is a single up-to-date HR policy or a specific page on the intranet.
That doesn’t mean SharePoint’s search feature is bad. On the contrary, SharePoint Search is a powerful search engine that can access large amounts of information within Microsoft 365. Precisely because SharePoint can search so many different sources, sites, pages, and documents, a good search experience requires the right setup. How do you ensure that employees find what they need faster, and what role can a solution like Fresh Intranet play in that?
One of Microsoft 365’s strengths is also one of its challenges. An enormous amount of information can be stored within a single environment: SharePoint sites, pages, document libraries, Teams environments, news posts, people, and more. SharePoint’s standard search functionality can search across all of that information. That’s useful when you want to search for information organization-wide, but less so when an employee is on the intranet and trying to find something specific there.
For example, suppose an employee is searching for “work-from-home policy.” That person probably doesn’t want to know on which project site, Teams environment, or old SharePoint site the term “working from home” was ever mentioned. The employee simply wants to find the current work-from-home policy. That’s where the difference lies between getting a lot of search results and actually finding what you’re looking for.
In addition, SharePoint Search relies heavily on how information is organized. Clear file names, consistent metadata, a logical information structure, and up-to-date content help the search engine return better results. Factors such as permissions and the scope of the search also determine which results an employee sees.
Before you look into additional technology, a good search starts with the basics. After all, a search engine can only work effectively with the information you provide it:
A well-designed intranet has a logical structure. Employees should be able to understand where information belongs not only through the search function but also through navigation and page layout. Therefore, avoid publishing the same information in various different places and determine which section serves as the source for each type of information. After all, if there are five versions of an HR document, it’s difficult for a search engine to determine which version an employee is referring to.
Metadata helps you find information not only based on words in a title or document, but also based on properties associated with the content. Think, for example, of a topic, department, location, document type, or target audience. SharePoint indexes this metadata, giving you additional ways to find information and refine search results. Keep in mind, however, that more metadata isn’t automatically better. A simple and consistently applied taxonomy is often more valuable than dozens of fields that editors rarely use.
Good searchability isn’t just about finding something—it’s mainly about finding the right thing. When old documents, duplicate pages, and outdated instructions remain in the search results, trust in the search function diminishes. Employees will then turn to other methods: they’ll ask a colleague, keep a copy for themselves, or resubmit the same question to HR or Communications. Effective content management and governance are therefore a crucial part of searching and finding information. Fresh also addresses this with features that allow, for example, metadata to be managed and outdated content to be identified.
When faced with dozens or hundreds of results, an employee doesn’t want to view each page individually. Filters can therefore greatly improve the search experience. Think of refining results by content type, author, date, or location. SharePoint offers options for this, but how they’re set up ultimately determines how user-friendly the search experience will be. And this is precisely where it becomes interesting to look at the difference between standard SharePoint and an intranet solution like Fresh.
Fresh Search also offers its own search results page that can be customized to meet the organization’s specific needs. For example, the search experience can use verticals to separate different types of information and refiners to further filter results. The search administrator determines which properties and filters are relevant to the organization.
As a result, an employee can, for example, search much more specifically for:
Fresh also offers multiple entry points to the same search experience. Employees can search from the global navigation, through a search box on a page, or via an adaptive card, among other options. This shifts the approach from “search everything and see what comes up” to “help me find the information relevant to my question as quickly as possible.”
Search is changing rapidly. Thanks to search engines and AI, we’re becoming less and less accustomed to figuring out exactly where information is located or what exact search term to use. We just want to be able to ask a question. Fresh addresses this with FreshMind. When this AI functionality is added to Fresh Search, an employee can ask a question in natural language. Fresh can then display an AI-generated answer above the regular search results. The regular search results remain available, so the employee can continue searching and view the underlying information.
That makes a significant difference. Instead of searching for “work-from-home policy” and then opening various results themselves, an employee can, for example, ask: “How many days a week am I allowed to work from home?” The search experience is thus shifting more and more from searching for information to getting an answer to a question. FreshMind can also use AI to interpret search queries to better understand what a user means. Fresh describes this as an extension of the existing search experience, not a replacement for it.
Another interesting feature is that Fresh lets you analyze what employees are searching for. For example, Fresh Search Analytics provides insight into popular search queries, searches that yield no results, the locations from which employees initiate searches, search suggestions used, and the use of various search verticals. This is valuable information for Communications, HR, and intranet administrators.
For example, if people are searching for “expense reports” with unusual frequency, but that search yields few relevant results, then you know there’s a gap somewhere. Perhaps the information is missing, it’s been tagged incorrectly, or the organization uses a different term internally. This way, search becomes not only a tool for employees but also a source of information you can use to continuously improve the intranet.
Standard SharePoint Search provides a powerful technical foundation. With a well-designed setup, clear metadata, up-to-date content, and the right configuration, you can already significantly improve the search experience. Fresh builds on that Microsoft foundation but focuses the experience much more explicitly on the intranet. Fresh itself is also built entirely on SharePoint Online, and the content and data remain within the organization’s Microsoft 365 tenant.
The difference, therefore, isn’t so much in the question, “Can SharePoint search?” Of course it can. The more interesting question is, “How easy do we make it for employees to actually find the right answer within all our information?” And that’s where Fresh can make a significant difference. With a dedicated search environment for the intranet, filters and verticals, search analytics, and AI functionality, it creates a search experience that’s much more tailored to what the employee is trying to accomplish.
Ultimately, a good intranet isn’t just a collection of pages, news articles, and documents. It should help employees do their jobs more easily. That’s why searching and finding information are such an important part of a SharePoint intranet. Start with the basics: ensure a solid structure, consistent metadata, up-to-date information, and a logical layout for SharePoint. But then also consider the experience you want to offer your employees. After all, if employees first have to know where something is before they can find it, your intranet is only doing part of its job.
With Fresh, you can enhance SharePoint with a search experience specifically designed for the intranet—and with FreshMind, it’s increasingly moving beyond simply displaying search results to providing concrete answers. Want to see how this works in practice? Visit our page on Fresh Intranet to learn more about the possibilities. Or schedule a demo, and we’ll show you how Fresh can make searching and finding information within a SharePoint intranet smarter.
