SharePoint 2010 Search : Search Reporting (part 1) - Farm Level Reports & Site Collection Reports

Therefore SharePoint 2010 has some great built-in reporting technology to allow search and farm administrators to monitor overall performance as well as allowing site collection administrators to monitor individual site search success and make modifications to the search behavior as well as the content based on those reports.

Reporting is a key feature in SharePoint 2010 that allows administrators to see statistical information on the behavior of the users and their interaction with the search engine. The reporting mechanism can identify key query terms that are causing frustration for users as well as areas of search that are not working optimally. There are two levels of reporting to administrators in SharePoint, the farm level and the site collection level. These levels are set to allow administrators with different levels of focus in the organization to get the reports that are useful for their particular job function. Farm administrators, who are responsible for the management of the SharePoint farm and its core functionality, can see reports that will help them maintain a working search engine and improve crawling and index quality. The site collection administrator can see reports for his or her site collection and all its sites and subsites. These reports help the site collection administrator optimize the search experience for his or her end users on their own level.

1. Farm Level Reports

General search reporting can be found in the Search service application in Central Administration and includes Top Queries and No Result queries. The point of this reporting is to help search or farm administrators learn about the general success and performance of the search engine. Content can be targeted for crawling, crawling errors can be addressed, authoritative pages set, and unwanted results removed based on information from these reports.

This farm-level reporting can help us identify these overall search performance issues and potentially make adjustments to the search engine at the search service to compensate for problems. To access the farm-level search reporting in SharePoint 2010, follow these steps:

In the base report, we can see the total number of search queries and the average number of search queries per day. This can help the administrator manage load and monitor search for performance. If this number is very high, the administrator should consider adding a query server after investigating the administrative reports. If this number is unusually low, the administrator should investigate why users are not searching and confirm that the search mechanism is working for all users. Sometimes poor site setting can restrict access to search or cause other problems that make search non-functional for end users, and they won't even complain.

On the top of the left-hand navigation, we can navigate to the Number of Queries report (Figure 1). This will give a more detailed view of the number of queries over time in a graph (Figure 2) and the exact numbers for each date (Figure 3).

Figure 1. The search reports page menu in the Search service application

Figure 2. Number of Queries page

Figure 3. No Results Queries report

2. Site Collection Reports

At the site collection level, there is more detailed reporting that will help the site collection administrators to identify areas where content and metadata can be improved to help search as well as add or improve best bets. Site collection reports show the data only for the individual site collection. An organization with many site collections will need to analyze the reports at different collections.

To understand the value of the reports, it is useful to understand the behaviors of search users. The basic mechanism of searching in SharePoint is similar to all search engines. A user enters a query into a search box, either on a search page or on a search field on any page in a SharePoint site. This query of one or many terms is passed to the search engine, and a list of matching hits is displayed in an order the search engine determines best for the given query. At this point, a user looks through the list and does one of a few things. The user can click a document to open it and move on, add terms to the query and search again, refine the result set with refiners, or just leave the search experience and navigate away.

From the search engine's perspective, this creates four basic search behaviors:

Although it seems strange, the "no results" behavior is extremely common for enterprise search engines. This is largely due to misspellings, synonym usage, or misconceptions by the end users. When a user searches for something he or she is certain exists or should exist in the organization—a key piece to achieving the information task at hand—and gets nothing, he or she can become extremely frustrated. This makes the "no results" search experience the most acute problem and the one of utmost urgency when optimizing the search engine.

The following reports are available under the Search section in the Site Collection Web Analytics Reports pages:

• Number of Queries

• Top Queries

• Failed Queries

• Best Bet Usage

• Best Bet Suggestions

• Best Bet Suggestions Action History

• Search Keywords

Each one of these report pages displays a different view of the search behaviour of the end users. These reports can help the administrator identify and correct for the failed search behaviour as well as give guidance on how to improve search with built in suggestions. The following sections will cover the important reports and how to best utilize them but first will outline the basic features of all report pages. In the Analyze tab of the ribbon on the report pages, the reports can be adjusted for timespan, filters can be applied, and the reports customized or exported for sharing or further analysis (Figure 4). Furthermore, alerts and reports can be scheduled for those that are too busy to remember to look at the reports regularly.

Figure 4. Analysis options for reports

There are some preset timespans available like week, month, or year. In addition, a custom timespan can be set. This data can be exported, and one timespan can be compared to another to perform benchmarking against changes or improvements made to search. The filtering mechanism for search reports allows for filtering based on pre-defined search scopes—that is, any scopes that are already created and used in the search interface. And Customize Reports allows for downloading the report to an Excel sheet to manipulate the reporting parameters. The Excel sheet maintains a data connection to the SharePoint site and will update the data as it changes. Excel makes it easy for administrators to generate custom graphs and work with the report data (Figure 5).

Figure 5. A (minimally) customized report in Excel

3. Number of Queries