SharePoint Search - Your Search Returned No Results

Overview

Search has now become an integral part of SharePoint-based portals. SharePoint is used for Content Management, hence we usually come across search implementation in an out of the box as well as a customized way.

Out of the box, SharePoint list view also offers the search box to quickly search the items inside the list. The results here are shown from the Search Index. That means, the item will not appear in the search result until it is crawled by the search and indexed. We may turn this option OFF from List Settings if not required.

Your search returned no results

This article is related to an issue faced by users in SharePoint 2013 On-Premise environment, however, it should work on other SharePoint On-premise environments too.

In the ideal situation, when you have list items added to your list and the list is indexed, then upon search, you should be able to see the inline search results in SharePoint list view as below.

1. Open the SharePoint list.
2. Type search keyword in the “Find an item” search box.
3. Click the Search icon or hit Enter.
   
   
   

However, at one point, we faced an issue where the search box stopped working. The result returned was as below.

The list had the matching data, which should have returned in the search results.

The full crawl was completed with no errors.

Primary investigation

It was obvious that the issue is related to the SharePoint search. So, we started with the basics of search to make sure that the below things are in place.

1. Check if URL of site to which the List belongs is being added to the Content Source in Search Service Application
2. Re-index the list from advanced settings of the List
3. Run a full crawl in Central Administration
4. Check for any errors in the crawl log

Unfortunately, none of the above options was helpful to resolve the issue.

Resolution

As all the SharePoint Search configuration looked fine, we dove deep in to Search Managed properties and came across a managed property “ListItemID”.

Follow the below steps to verify if the “ListItemID” is set as searchable.

1. Open SharePoint Central Admin.
2. Navigate to Search Service Application.
3. Open “Search Schema” from the left navigation.
4. Search managed property “ListItemID”.
5. Make sure that the “Searchable” checkbox is selected.
   
   
   

6. Click "OK" to save changes.
7. Optionally, run the full crawl.

With this search settings in place, now we should be able to see the search results in a list view. Although if it still does not work, follow the below steps.

1. Open the list.
2. Navigate to List Settings.
3. Open Advanced Settings.
4. Click “Reindex List”.
5. Wait for incremental search.
   
   

Even if at this stage, you are not able to see the search working on your list, try the below options.

1. Open the list.
2. Add any test list item.
3. Or optionally update any existing list item.
4. Re index the list.
5. Wait for the incremental crawl to happen.

With all the above scenarios, hopefully you should have the list displaying the search results based on the search keyword.