SharePoint 2013 Search Result

Hello everybody! My name is Kate Dramstad, and I'm a Program Manager working on the SharePoint search team. I'll be talking to you about improvements in the SharePoint 2013 search experience. This post is a high-level overview of how result types and display templates work together to create rich search experiences. If you take away only one concept from this post it should be: Result Types + Display Templates = Rich Search Experiences.

Creating a great search experience 

A great search experience is characterized by how easy it is for the user to quickly find what they are looking for. In most search UI, all of the search results look the same, so it is up to the user to carefully scan each result, or worse, to "pogostick"—jump back and forth between the results page and a result trying to decide if that particular result is what they were looking for. In an ideal search experience, the user should be able to click only once, feeling confident they have found what they were looking for. 

SharePoint 2013 offers a huge improvement in the search experience through display templates and result types. Gone are the days of uniform-looking results and endless scanning. Documents aren't all the same, and search results shouldn't be either. In SharePoint 2013, you have the ability to control the look of the search results on a very granular level. Take a look at this screenshot below. Each colorful box represents an area of the UI that's being controlled by a different display template.

Figure 1: The look of each Search UI component is controlled by different display templates.

 

There are display templates for each of the different results types within the search results, the hover panel for each result type, and each of the refinement controls. Each of these areas can be customized so that you can deliver a search experience that will delight your users.
A result type consists primarily of a set of rules that describe which of the items in the search results match that result type. When a user issues a query, the results come back and each result is evaluated against the rules in the result types. A display template is then applied to the result based on the type that it matches. By default, SharePoint 2013 includes several predefined result types:

• Rich document results for PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents
• Rich conversation results for Newsfeed posts, replies, and community discussions
• Rich video results, and more…

You can read about the People result type in the blog post Introducing People Search. Each result type has its own display template, making it look different from other result types and surfacing properties that are most relevant to a specific kind of document.