People search in SharePoint is based on the accounts you can see in the User Profiles blade in the SharePoint Admin center
And as you properly know the accounts in the User Profiles will very often be a mess of expired accounts, Meeting Room, External users, Test account and a lot more.
These are my notes for cleaning up the People/Employee search in SharePoint
Exclude former employees
“SPS-HideFromAddressLists” originates in Exchange and is primarily used to decide which accounts that should not be shown in the Global Address list. In many companies/orgs this property is set to true/1 when somebody leaves the org.
This makes it a very useful property as it is the best indicator we have on whether an account is active or not.
"SPS-HideFromAddressLists"<>1 (show only accounts that should not be hidden in the GAL)
-preferredname:admin*
-preferredname:test*
Exclude accounts which does not use a specific email domain
This filter is an excellent way to exclude external users and consultants with a full account within the org. Please note that we often exclude accounts by specifying that the field should contain a specific value.
WorkEmail:@contoso.com
-Department:External
-Department:Management
It is possible to define a query that will exclude the accounts that do not have any value in a specific field.
Since KQL (the Language we are using in the search queries) can't search for "Fields which does not contain any value" we have to use a little trick:
If we want to exclude the accounts that does not have a cell phone number, we simply must reverse that requirement, and hence it will be "include those accounts that have a value in the cell phone field":
(MobilPhone:0* OR MobilPhone:1* OR MobilPhone:2* OR MobilPhone:3* OR MobilPhone:4* OR MobilPhone:5* OR MobilPhone:6* OR MobilPhone:7* OR MobilPhone:8* OR MobilPhone:9*)
In this example we are using the auto generated property owstaxIdSPShDepartment and the guid specified is the root node of the Department term set: (look in the Term Store for those guids)
owstaxIdSPShDepartment:"#8ed8c9ea-7052-4c1d-a4d7-b9c10bffea6f"
So using that in our query will insure that only account with a value in the Department field in included in our result. Neat, right?
Exclude accounts having a specific AccountName
-AccountName:Prod\B
This will enable you to exclude specific Accounts or groups of accounts like meeting rooms, cars and similar object as the AccountName often indicates which kind of account it is.
In this case search scope is defined as the list of fields/properties in the SharePoint User Profile used in the matching. By default we are matching against every field, however this will sometimes cause some rather strange results, espcially if you are not using Ranking.
Example: In this Org we have a department called QA, and would expect the members of that department to show up when doing a search for the query "QA", however Bob from Accounting shows up as number 4 result, ahead of several collegues from the QA department. Why?
Well, after going through Bobs account we can see he is a member of a security group named "Financial QA".......and that is sufficient to mess up the search results.
Of the UPA fields Description, Interests, Memberships and PeopleKeywords can contains values that causes unexpected results.
One option that will solve this issue could be to limit your search to only match on a set of specific fields. This will to some extend reduce the general usebility of people search as the end users might not be awere of this limitation.
Often these fields are used in such at limited search:
FirstName
LastName
PreferredName
Department
PeopleKeywords
WorkEmail
MobilePhone
Location
Responsibilities
PastProjects
MobilePhone
Interests
Description
JobTitle
MobilePhone
Skills
Ranking and sorting decides in which order the search results will be shown.
Sorting by Name
FirstName
LastName
PreferredName
Sorting using XRANK
XRANK specifies a numeric value for each result, usually calculated by Microsoft using the selected Ranking Model. But we are able to tweak this ranking calculation by boosting results that matches a keyword.
Example:
XRANK(cb=1.5)
FirstName:{searchTerms} OR XRANK(cb=0.5) Department:{searchTerms}
In this case we are boosting an account by factor 1.5 (150%) if the query matches FirstName and by 50% if the query matches Department.
Ranking model
In most cases we are using the ”People
Search social distance model” ranking model as it is a good allround model for people search.
Additional info: Tech
and me: People Search ranking for dummies (techmikael.com)
Tooling
When working with User profile data and search you should be familiar with these tools:
SharePoint Administation, specificly User Profiles (raw data) and the Search Schema on the tenant level ( mapning fields from UPA to Managed Properties)
SP Query Tool, PnP-Tools/Solutions/SharePoint.Search.QueryTool
at master · pnp/PnP-Tools · GitHub, a desktop app that allows you to test both your quiries and your data.
SP Editor,
a Chrome/Edge extension , GitHub -
tavikukko/Chrome-SP-Editor: Extension for creating and updating files (js, css)
in SharePoint Online from Developer Tools
Similar to the SP Quiry Tool as far as Search goes, and contains a lot of other SP related features.
