Have you ever used SharePoint search and still struggled to find exactly what you need? You are not alone – employees can reportedly lose between 1.8 and 2.5 hours a day searching for information that’s buried in documents or poorly ranked search results, according to various industry reports on information retrieval challenges. Modern AI-driven search capabilities and relevance-based summaries, however, can now help SharePoint deliver more accurate results, potentially reducing wasted search time.
Understanding User Intent in SharePoint Search
Traditional search engines often matched only the exact words you typed, but modern search approaches can help SharePoint understand what you mean. Traditional SharePoint search relies on keyword matching, stemming, and ranking models. Solutions leveraging modern AI—often referred to by vendors as “query intelligence”—can take this further. When combined with tools like PointFire Search Summarizer and PnP Modern Search, these approaches use semantic understanding and contextual clues (such as your recent activity) to refine results and deliver more relevant answers.
By understanding language nuances and context, AI makes SharePoint search much more powerful and accurate.
Personalized Results with Machine Learning
Beyond language, modern SharePoint search uses machine learning to adjust results based on user behavior. For example, Microsoft Search will rank a document higher if it is popular or frequently clicked in similar searches, providing a basic level of personalization based on user signals.
Smarter Results with AI Summaries
Even with smarter query understanding, users often get a long list of results and must open documents one by one to find their answer—an area where third-party AI solutions can help. The PointFire Search Summarizer directly tackles this problem by adding an AI-generated summary to each search result. It plugs into SharePoint to show a snippet explaining why each document is relevant to your query. Instead of just a title and short preview, you see the key sentences that match your needs. Furthermore, the summarizer’s logic is designed to warn you if a document contains your keywords in an irrelevant context, helping you avoid a false lead. Vendors offering these summarization features often claim such tools can cut down search time by 20–40% by eliminating this frustration.
Searching Across Languages
Many organizations have multilingual SharePoint sites, and query intelligence extends to multiple languages as well. PointFire’s multilingual tools – PointFire Translator for content and PointFire 365 for interface – integrate with SharePoint search to ensure users can work in their preferred language. The PointFire Search Summarizer also supports cross-language queries – your query, the document, and even the interface can each be in different languages, and you will still get a helpful summary. Thanks to AI, advanced search in SharePoint becomes multilingual – language is no longer a barrier to finding what you need.
AI-driven query intelligence might be hidden behind the scenes or provided via third-party enhancements, but it is already transforming the SharePoint search experience. By learning from our language and behavior, these intelligent tools make SharePoint search more intuitive and efficient. As organizations adopt solutions like PointFire to enhance search, users will spend less time searching and more time getting work done. The hidden power of query intelligence is about delivering exactly what SharePoint users really want—right when they need it.
