{"id":11298,"date":"2023-06-12T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2023-06-12T16:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=11298"},"modified":"2026-04-09T07:46:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T14:46:37","slug":"transform-your-internal-search-with-tips-from-our-expert-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/transform-your-internal-search-with-tips-from-our-expert-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"Transform your internal search with tips from our expert at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MicrosoftGetting the right information at the right time is key to maximizing the productivity of your employees\u2014that\u2019s exactly the goal of the team that administers search internally here at Microsoft.<\/p>\n

We spoke with Dodd Willingham to learn more about the search admin controls we use to manage our internal search profile and to share our best practices for using Microsoft Search, our internal search product. Willingham\u2014one of our resident experts on internal search\u2014is a principal product manager for the Digitally Assisted Workday team on our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team.<\/p>\n

Inside Track: <\/strong>What Microsoft Search administration controls are you using to improve search for our employees?<\/p>\n

Willingham:<\/strong> The most popular controls are called answers<\/em>, and you can find them in the Microsoft 365 Search admin center<\/a>. They include bookmarks, Q&As, acronyms, locations, and subscriptions. We use all of them.<\/p>\n

\"Willingham
Dodd Willingham works on the Digitally Assisted Workday team in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. His team\u2019s job is to enhance the internal search experience for employees across Microsoft.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Inside Track: <\/strong>Which one do you use the most?<\/p>\n

Willingham<\/strong>: Bookmarks are the most heavily used search admin capability because they\u2019re the most impactful. They help employees find frequently visited sites, apps, and authoritative content immediately. In a typical month, they are used (clicked on) in 40\u201350 percent of all searches on our main SharePoint portal and Bing\u2019s work search.<\/p>\n

By setting up bookmarks, you can make sure a particular link shows up at the top of the results whenever a search term matches\u2013\u2013or is even similar to\u2013\u2013one of the keywords listed for the bookmarks. For instance, within MS, we have about 1,200 bookmarks, half of which exist to support the most common searches employees perform.<\/p>\n

Inside Track: <\/strong>When a search term is relevant to multiple bookmarks, how can the right information be on top?<\/p>\n

Willingham<\/strong>: For that, you need the Q&A answer, which is like bookmarks, but more flexible. To explain that, I need to give some background. Q&As were originally created to enable the admin to give quick specific answers to common questions. But within a company as large as Microsoft, maintaining an accurate answer for every person in every organization and country is a huge task. So, search doesn\u2019t do that, it lets the right owners do that maintenance. Instead, let\u2019s say you have five possible links for one search term. You can create a Q&A with those five links and provide explanation about each one so the user can rapidly navigate to the link they need.<\/p>\n

Inside Track: <\/strong>When you say you use \u2018acronyms\u2019 <\/em>what do you mean?<\/p>\n

Willingham<\/strong>: It\u2019s essentially a glossary for in-house acronyms. At Microsoft, we have tens of thousands of acronyms, and some are used differently across our organizations. Imagine trying to find the meaning of such an internal, context-specific acronym on the web. Impossible. Yet employees want to find the meanings of acronyms when they need them in their workflow. Using the acronyms answer in search, they see the expanded text and often a supportive description.<\/p>\n

To populate your glossary, you can data-mine or enter your acronyms manually. Within Microsoft, we simply load the acronyms from our Term Store in SharePoint, which has about 10,000 acronyms, and the system data mines 20,000 more.<\/p>\n

Inside Track: <\/strong>What\u2019s the purpose of locations?<\/p>\n

Willingham:<\/strong> We wanted a central place for employees to find the addresses of all our corporate offices and important facilities. Not every physical site Microsoft owns, but those sites employees are most likely to travel to. So we defined them to search as locations.<\/p>\n

However, they don\u2019t have to be limited to locations owned by your company; they can include any place of frequent interest to your organization.<\/p>\n

Inside Track: <\/strong>How can Search administration answers help employees find the latest industry-specific news and information?<\/p>\n

Willingham<\/strong>: In the past, employees could pick up a magazine or journal at the office. Today, they need a way to find their organization\u2019s subscriptions virtually. That\u2019s the purpose of subscriptions<\/em>. Our search admins configure search to crawl our more than 40 subscriptions, littering their content within the normal search results employees receive, thus enabling our employees to discover this information within the scope of a normal search.<\/p>\n

Which brings me back to where we started\u2014enabling our employees to find the right information at the right time.<\/p>\n

\"Key<\/p>\n

Inside Track: <\/strong>What are some of the best practices for using search administration answers that you\u2019ve developed within Microsoft?<\/p>\n

Willingham: <\/strong>Keep your bookmarks fresh. Here are some ways to do that:<\/p>\n