SharePoint Stuff

Modern SharePoint

To remove results using the search results removal option, you will need to use an account that has administrator privileges to access the SharePoint admin center.

Option 1: remove URL’s from search results

• Navigate to the SharePoint Online admin center > press more features
• Open Search

• On the search page, press Remove Search Results
• Enter the full URL(s) of the items you want to remove from the search results. I enter each URL on a separate line
• Press Remove Now

Option 2: stop items appearing in search results at the library level

Here’s another way to remove items from the search results, this time by disabling indexing from the library where the item is stored:

• Navigate to the library > press the cog button > library settings
• Advanced settings > under Search > set Allow items from this document library to appear in search results? to No
• Press OK

NOTE: This option is only available at the library level and thus will stop everything from within the library appearing in the search results. If you only wanted say one item removed from search results, it would be better to use option 1.

A note on retrieving the crawl logs

I also wanted to call out one other part of the search results puzzle that you can make use of in modern SharePoint – that being the crawl log.

You can use SharePoint PnP cmdlets in PowerShell to return entries from the search crawl log in SharePoint. To do so you will need to be granted access to the crawl log via the SharePoint admin center.

This could be a useful way of viewing indexed content, however it isn’t the same as the classic crawl log, in as much as you can’t remove items from the index and it is limited to the site collection you are connected to.

Here’s some more information on getting started:

• Get-PnPSearchCrawlLog
• Connect-PnPOnline

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