Bookmark Recommendations in Microsoft Search
Bookmark Recommendations in Microsoft Search
Bookmark Recommendations
Bookmark Answers in Microsoft Search provide the flexibility for you to curate and promote curated resources on top of ranked results to help guide users to authoritative resources.
Bookmark Answers are designed to help employee’s way find the organization and quickly identify the best and most relevant resource curated by you or your organization such as authoritative sites or documents to satisfy the searchers’ intent. Examples of Bookmark Answers can include sites, documents, or even files such as the Human Resources site, policy document, or more.
Microsoft Search now simplifies the process of creating and curating Bookmarks with Recommended Bookmarks. Bookmark recommendations are generated by reasoning across SharePoint sites in Microsoft 365 to suggest Bookmarks to the Microsoft Search administrator, reducing the need to manually look across sites and information to determine the most valuable resources to editorially curate and promote to users of Microsoft Search.
Learn more about Answers in Microsoft Search at https://wbaer.net/2020/10/making-the-most-of-answers-in-microsoft-search/.
Recommended Bookmarks in Microsoft Search
Recommended Bookmarks are mined from across SharePoint sites in Microsoft 365 and promoted to the Microsoft Search administrator for publication.
As an administrator of Microsoft Search you will be able to either enable or disable the automatic generation of recommended Bookmarks and optionally select to have Bookmarks automatically published to users in your organization; otherwise Bookmarks will be presented to the search administrator in the “Suggested” state where they can be manually reviewed, excluded and/or published using the Search & intelligence admin dashboard.
Recommended Bookmarks include the following mined information from SharePoint sites:
- URL
- Title (as configured by the SharePoint admins)
- Keywords (Deciphered using SuggestKeyword service in Bookmark settings)
- Description (Only if configured on SharePoint site/page)
Configuring recommended Bookmarks
To allow bookmark recommendations in Microsoft Search, select Manage from Answers | Bookmarks in the Search & intelligence admin center.
From the available options, choose ‘Allow Microsoft Search to recommend bookmarks’ and optionally whether to curate or auto-publish recommended (mined) bookmarks by choosing either ‘Automatically publish recommended bookmarks for your users’ or ‘Manually select recommended bookmarks to publish for your users’.
Recommended Bookmarks provide the following setting configurations.
| Configuration | Behavior | *New Configuration | *New Behavior |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recommendations – Enabled Auto publish – Enabled | Bookmark recommendations are enabled. Recommended Bookmarks collected are automatically published to the organization | Recommendations – Disabled Auto publish – NA | Bookmark recommendations are disabled in Microsoft Search – recommended Bookmarks collected prior to disabling recommendations will be published. |
| Recommendations – Enabled Auto publish – Enabled | Bookmark recommendations are enabled. Recommended Bookmarks collected are automatically published to the organizatio | Recommendations – Enabled Auto publish – Disabled | New delta recommended Bookmarks are made available in the admin center in a “Suggested” state. Bookmarks recommendations in a “Published” state are unaffected. |
| Recommendations – Enabled Auto publish – Disabled | Bookmark recommendations are enabled. Recommended Bookmarks collected are made available in the admin center in a “Suggested” state. | Recommendations – Enabled Auto publish – Enabled | New delta recommended Bookmarks are made available in the admin center in a “Published” state. Bookmarks recommendations in a “Suggested” state are unaffected. |
| Recommendations – Enabled Auto publish – Disabled | Bookmark recommendations are enabled. Recommended Bookmarks collected are made available in the admin center in a “Suggested” state. | Recommendations – Disabled Auto publish – NA | Bookmark recommendations are disabled in Microsoft Search – recommended Bookmarks collected prior to disabling recommendations will be published. |
| Recommendations – Disabled Auto publish – NA | Bookmark recommendations are disabled in Microsoft Search. | Recommendations – Enabled Auto publish – Enabled | Bookmark recommendations are enabled. Recommended Bookmarks collected are automatically published to the organization |
| Recommendations – Disabled Auto publish – NA | Bookmark recommendations are disabled in Microsoft Search. | Recommendations – Enabled Auto publish – Disabled | Bookmark recommendations are enabled. Recommended Bookmarks collected are made available in the admin center in a “Suggested” state. |
NOTE Bookmarks that remain in a “Suggested” greater than 180 days are removed.
Managing duplicate Bookmarks
All recommended URLs are checked against URLs in existing bookmarks with a Published, Suggested, Excluded, or Scheduled state. If a matching URL is found in any of these existing bookmarks the link will not be recommended.
Using exclusion rules with recommended Bookmarks
If you want to exclude certain Bookmark URLs, in addition to child URLs associated with parent URL, setting a Bookmark to an “Excluded” state will prevent the Bookmark from being rendered in search. Administrators of Microsoft Search can override this setting and elect to force publication of a child URL associated with a parent URL. For example, https://contoso.com would be a parent URL of https://contoso.com/sites/marketing.
How are recommended Bookmarks displayed in search?
The end user experience for recommended and editorial bookmarks are very similar experience. Editorial bookmarks will include the text “Published by
Learn more about Answers in Microsoft Search at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftsearch/plan-your-content.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What conditions/criteria are used to recommend a bookmark?
A: Multiple conditions are responsible for bookmark recommendations to include:
- SharePoint sites that have high number of visits in last 7 days
- SharePoint sites with high number of unique users visiting it in last 7 days
- SharePoint sites with high number of visits in last 30 days
- SharePoint sites with high unique users in last 30 days
Once sites meeting these conditions are discovered, the site is checked to determine if it has been previously bookmarked. If yes, those are ignored and then top 10 sites per mining cycle are recommended in the Search & intelligence admin center.
Q: What are the limits to recommended bookmarks (how many will be created)?
A: 10 per recommendation cycle.
Q: Will the same conditions/criteria used to recommend a bookmark be used to “clean-up” bookmarks that are old, not used, etc. or is manual deletion required?
A: Recommended bookmarks will not be automatically removed. Only where recommended bookmarks are in suggested state for greater than 180 days are they removed.