Simple Microsoft Search Reference Architecture

Most small and mid-sized organizations do not invest heavily in tailoring their M365 environment and often use the default settings provided by Microsoft.

However, it doesn't have to require an expensive consultant to enhance the search experience in your tenant. Just follow these simple steps and the out of the box Search will by default only show current content.

The approach is to segregate the content into two categories; current content and deprecated content. You will be able to search all of the content but search for deprecated content will require a little more effort.,

An alternative to the approch shown here is to archive the site using M365 Archiving, but that will prevent end users from searching the archived content.

In this image I have two hubs and a number of site outside the "Deprecated Content" area.

Both Hubs and the associated site will show up in the default search.

The "Deprecated Content" and associated sites are hidden in the default search

Once a site no longer is in active use, you can associate the site with the "Deprecated content" Hub site, and after a short time the site and content will no longer show up in the default search.

So how do I change my setup to achieve this?

Step 1 is to create a Hub Site, "Deprecated content", which will be the hub you should connect a site to once the site and its content not longer should show up in default Search.

A few minutes after the new site has been created, it will be available in the Search index, and you must now lookup the ID for this site.

There are multiple ways to find the ID:

Use the SharePoint Admin center, find the site and click to see the details. The ID is now shown in the URL:

Install the browser extension SP Editor, search for the site using the Path, and you will find the ID in the Managed Properties SiteID and RelatedHubSites

Now switch to the Search and Intelligence Admin Center.

In the "Customizations" tab you will see a number of options, select "Verticals"

This is the configuration area for the Search Verticals on the tenant level.

Click on the All vertical :

Click the "edit" link for Query

In the Query box paste:

-RelatedHubSites:[The Site ID from above]

In my case it looks like this:

-RelatedHubSites:c543968f-4626-49b3-bcbf-6a140859db30

Please note the minus sign before "RelatedHubSites", it is NOT a typo, as the query means "show me everything but exclude anything from the Hub with this ID"

Click next, next and update this vertical.

Do the same for the verticals "Files", "Sites" and "Images"

Once SharePoint has picked up the changes we will be able to see that content from the "Deprecated content" no longer shows up when we use those Search verticals.

But wait, now I can't search in the content associated with the "Deprecated content" Hub at all !!!

Correct, let's fix that.

In the Search and Intelligence Admin center you can add a new Search Vertical, like this:

The Query is almost the same as before, except the minus sign is gone, because in this vertical we wish to see only content from the "Deprecated content" hub.

Now the Search looks like this:

And now it is up to YOU to ensure that obsolete sites are associated with the "Deprecated content" hub, and your default search is kept fresh and relevant.

More to read; Manage search verticals | Microsoft Learn

this also includes a trick that will ensure that you can see you changes to the verticals without having to wait for hours ( cacheClear=true)