Finding documents in Sharepoint online/Office 365 can be tedious. If you want to restrict your search to certain document types (like: reports, inquiries, CVs, sales orders, invoices) you either end up with too many irrelevant search hits or relevant documents don't show up because they don't include the search term. If you rely on Sharepoint's fulltext search capabilities only, then your users will be frustrated and spend too much time to find the right documents.

You can provide your users with a better search experience if you use search refiners. Users can further refine their search result by clicking on the refiner values, e.g. to retrieve "sales orders" or "invoices", only. Before you are able to create meaningful search refiners, you have to arrange for a couple of pre-requisites which include tagging documents with tags. This guide shows you how to automatically tag documents with their type (e.g. invoice, sales order, cv, inquiry) and how to provide search refiners that contain these document types.

Frustrating search experience without meaningful refiners:

Entering the search term "order" returns a lot of irrelevant documents (e.g. a CV) and even misses some sales order documents.

Better: filter documents by type, language, etc:

If you provide search refiners, then the users will be able to precicely filter for all "sales order" documents, for instance.

Steps to improve your search experience with meaningful refiners:

Create a termset with your document types

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.

Create a column for your document library that contins the document types

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.

Manually tag a couple of documents as examples (not all!)

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.

Install the Easy Tagging App from the App Source (free evaluation!)

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.

Teach a "Learn Tags" perdictor to learn from your examples

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.

Create a tagger that automatically creates tags for all documents (and future documents)

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.

Update the search schema

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.

Create an Enterprise Search Center

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.

Add the new refiner to the search page

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.

Verify the refiner values

Launch the automatic tagging process for all documents in a library (or a subset) in the "Tag documents"-dialog. Inspect the tagging progress and check the tagging report after the process has completed.