Understanding how SharePoint Online search works is one of the learning curves faced by many Microsoft 365 tenant administrators. Because search is so important to SharePoint, this topic is well-covered ground for people who worked with SharePoint Server (on-premises). The magic that melds managed properties, crawled properties, mapping, custom cpolumns, indexes, and so on into search doesn’t hold any mysteries.
Things are different for those who come to SharePoint because of its core role within Microsoft 365. SharePoint Online is not the center of an ecosystem like SharePoint Server is. Like Exchange Online delivers email services, the cloud version of SharePoint takes on a completely different role as the provider of document management services to other workloads, like Teams. The different role doesn’t make search any less important. People still want to find files quickly and easily but competing demands from across Microsoft 365 mean that administrators sometimes pay less attention to the finer details of search. After all, search just works in the cloud…
Generally, SharePoint search does just work. Sometimes complexities do exist, like finding out how to find files with a specific sensitivity label. Although users mightn’t want to look for labelled files, administrators might need this knowledge to find labelled files in eDiscovery searches, and that’s why some knowledge about how search works is a good skill to acquire, even for non-SharePoint people. In my case, it helped me to maximize the advantage of creating a custom column for a site.
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