Beginners Guide : Crawled and Managed Properties in SharePoint 2013 Search

This is a continuation of my Beginners guide “Introduction to SharePoint 2013 Search”. In this article we can have a look at Crawled and Managed properties, which are considered as heart of a Search Based application.

Crawled Properties in Search

Crawled properties are created inside of the search service application when the indexer crawls repositories. When the indexer is crawling the repositories, it discovers fields defined inside that repository. Things like title, author, created, modified date. Those fields are added into the index in the form of crawled properties.

Managed Properties in Search

Managed properties are defined in SharePoint and they are defined against crawled properties. So, the idea is that, a managed property can be mapped to one or more crawled properties. The reason behind this is, when you are indexing multiple repositories, these various repositories may all have a concept of a particular piece of metadata, but use different names for it.

In the below table you can find various Managed properties.

Queryable, Refinable, Retrievable, Searchable and Sortable are some of the frequently used properties. These are the properties that determine what this managed property is good for.

In SharePoint 2013, it’s important to note that site columns can now become managed properties automatically and also we can actually re-index a specific list or site, instead of having to crawl the entire farm.

Managed properties can be mapped to crawled properties at

1. Search service application layer, or

2. Site collection level

Managed Properties at Search service application level

The below steps take us to the Managed properties that can be mapped to Crawled properties in Search Service Application.

Step 1: Go to Central Admin -> Manage Service Application

Step 2: Look for Search Service Application and click on that.

Step 3: In Search Service Application page click on Search Schema which will be available on the left side navigation.

Step 4: Search Schema is where we manage the Crawled and Managed properties associated with the search service application.

Managed Properties at Site collection level

Step 1: Go to root of the site collection and click on Site Settings.

Step 2: Here you can find the Managed properties just like what we have seen at Search service application level.

Happy Coding

Ahamed