Search

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SharePoint provides powerful search functionalities but do you want your business solution data to be found this way? I consider SharePoint to be a data store and do not want users to use SharePoint directly to interact with data. A business solution (canvas apps, cloud flows) is used for that. There are administrator activities where I do support the direct interaction with data in SharePoint.

All lists and document libraries have a setting to instruct the SharePoint search engine to skip that list/document library. I thus always configure this setting so the data – and as a result also the data location – is not to be found via search.

I do not want to use the same SharePoint sites I use for data storage to also contain content pages about the business solution because I do want these content pages to be found by the SharePoint search engine.

You must have sufficient rights on a list/document library to configure the search setting. The following default permission levels allow this:

  • Design
  • Edit
  • Full Control

Below, the steps are given on how to disable search on lists and document libraries.

  1. Go to the settings page of the list/document library.
  2. Select the option Advanced settings.
  3. Set the option Allow items from this list to appear in search results? to No.
  4. Click on the button OK.

Video

This video demonstrates how to disable search on a SharePoint list/document library and that data is then indeed not shown in SharePoint search results.

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