Microsoft Search is included with desktop and online versions of Office 365 apps. It can also be accessed from the Windows Search box, the Microsoft Edge New tab page, or from any browser at Bing.com or Office.com.
In Office apps, including modern SharePoint sites, you’ll find the Microsoft Search box in the header bar:
You can also use the Windows Search box on your taskbar to get the same personalized work results:
For quick access to Microsoft Search, you can use the Edge New tab page:
From any browser, you can get results by going to Bing.com or Office.com and signing in to your school or work account:
No matter where you start your work or school search, the results will always be private and secure. Users authenticate by signing in to their Microsoft Entra account and only see results for files, sites, and other information shared with them.
Also, all search requests from Microsoft Search in Bing are made over HTTPS and the connection is encrypted. Work searches on Bing are de-identified and logs are separated from public search traffic.
Microsoft Search is a secure, easily managed enterprise search experience. It’s integrated across Microsoft 365 applications, your desktop, and browser to deliver more relevant internal results and increase productivity.
Using the power of AI and Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Search provides a familiar search experience to help people in your organization find information—like files, sites, people, answers, and more. Best of all, there’s no initial admin setup and it’s included at no extra cost with your Microsoft 365 subscription. As an owner, decision maker, or admin for your company, school, or nonprofit, use the info in this module to evaluate the experience and potential cost savings of this solution.
Watch this video for more information about Microsoft Search.
Scenario: Suppose you’re an IT admin who oversees your company or school’s intranet. Management is looking for ways to reduce support costs while also increasing productivity. Your boss tasks you with finding a way to improve your organization’s search experience. With the current search solution, many users complain it’s often difficult and time-consuming to find work info because it doesn’t index Microsoft 365 content. Also, you’ve been given a limited budget to implement a new solution.
To see how some organizations have taken advantage of the cost and time-saving power of Microsoft Search, including reducing the number of certain support tickets by up to 60%, review the Forrester report on the total economic impact of Microsoft Search.
Learning objectives
At the end of this module, you should be able to:
Summarize Microsoft Search and its features.
Identify the different entry points for Microsoft Search.
List the different types of results users can find.
Locate the Search & intelligence settings in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Once an educator assigns a research project using Search Progress, learners use an augmented version of Search Coach to search for, collect, and annotate a desired number of sources. Like “showing your work” in a math question, Search Progress requires learners to show their research process and the critical thinking behind their source selections. When learners explain their selections and reflect on their research process, educators gain insight into learners’ thinking every step of the way.
In their assignment, learners see the parameters for their research project. They begin their assignment by selecting Search Progress from the My Work section of the assignment. Learn more about the learner’s experience with a Search Progress assignment in the following video.
Search Coach is a great resource for learners to use to search the internet, and as a “search engine with training wheels,” it can be integrated easily as part of existing in-class activities and discussions.
But what about when ad-hoc searching isn’t enough, and educators want to assign structured research projects?
Search Progress is a powerful learning app that naturally weaves into any existing research-related assignments such as essays, posters, and presentations, all in the existing framework of Teams Assignments. Through Insights and through the assignment structure itself, Search Progress is unique in its ability to help teachers “see” student thinking at each step of the research process.
Before Search Progress, educators only saw the finished product of a research project—the written report or presentation with a “Works cited” (or bibliography) page. Educators no longer have to wonder how learners found their sources, why they selected those sources, or how thorough their research was.
Search Progress allows educators to learn not just how learners search but the critical thinking they use to select sources. With a Search Progress assignment, educators can require learners to provide:
An explanation for each source they chose
A reflection on their research process
Educators are free to craft any prompt for the learners’ explanations or reflections. These fields are key opportunities for learners to build their metacognition and discernment skills; skills that benefit them well beyond the bounds of a single research assignment.
Learners might explain:
Why they saved a source
The significance of the source
Who funds the website
The most important information from the source
Any other key factor educators deem important to the goals of the research project
Learners might reflect on:
Their research behaviors
What they learned from using Search Progress
Which search terms were most helpful
What they’ll do differently for their next research project
Any other overarching theme educators deem important to the goals of the research project
Once learners finish their research, educators can review each learner’s assignment summary page. The final deliverable includes:
Top-level metrics about the assignment
A search-by-search breakdown of the learner’s search habits
The queries that led to each source saved
Specifically, educators can see:
How many searches learners conducted
How many sources learners saved
How many links learners opened
Filters learners used
An ever-growing list of Insights updated based on educator feedback
If assigned, educators can also review learners’ explanations and reflections regarding their sources and their research process. As with any Teams assignment, educators can then provide feedback and grade the assignment, or provide feedback and return the assignment to a learner for refinement.
Search Coach improves learners’ critical thinking when it comes to research and finding source information. These skills can be further supercharged by a simple concept: lateral reading.
When teaching information literacy, it’s no longer sufficient to rely on a website’s domain, About page, or aesthetics to judge its credibility. These features can be deceptive. Research shows that both students and adults often misjudge a site’s trustworthiness based on looks alone—a holdover from the early web. Today, it’s tough to tell if a site is truly neutral or a facade for specific agendas.
Lateral reading, which involves comparing multiple sources to verify information, is a crucial skill for navigating the digital age. This method marks a significant shift from traditional analysis and is vital for both learners and educators to master.
For an introduction to the concept of lateral reading, we encourage you to explore this video (runtime 3 minutes, 33 seconds).
In a Stanford History Education Group study on lateral reading, researchers Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew state that “When reading laterally, one leaves a website and opens new tabs along a horizontal axis in order to use the resources of the Internet to learn more about a site and its claims.” Learners discover what other sources have to say about certain articles by opening a new tab. They practice lateral reading by finding important words such as names, organizations, and events on one site and exploring them in new searches.
By teaching strategies like lateral reading, Search Coach empowers learners to build critical thinking skills while using the web as a research tool, preparing them to face future challenges as successful digital citizens.
Lateral reading for smart searching
Just because something is online doesn’t make it official or accurate. It’s important to keep that in mind when you’re searching the Internet—whether it’s for a school project or something in your personal life.
How to read laterally
Instead of just reading a webpage from top to bottom, open new tabs and keep searching!
Search Coach does more than teach learners the mechanics of search. The following special features teach learners to think and read critically when searching the Internet.
Search Coach tips
When learners open the Search Coach tab, they see a “Search tip of the day” below the search box. These tips rotate regularly and help learners build search skills.
When learners are actively searching, more tips appear beneath the search box. Some tips rotate, while learners’ queries trigger others. By paying attention to the tips, learners can refine their search habits and get more relevant, reliable results.
Tips like the one above help learners understand that browsers operate on inferred intent, yielding results that satisfy a searcher’s desire. To explore this essential concept further, check out the Search Coach lesson plan for Choosing a pet. One of the best uses of tips is to inspire in-class activities and conversations; to learn more, check out the lesson plans linked at the bottom of this page!
With Search Coach, educators and learners have tools to modify their searches. These features help learners develop patterns they can use for a search query—the phrase or keyword combination typed into a search box—in traditional search engines.
The four standard tools are:
Domain
File type
Date range
Operators
Domain
Domains indicate the type of website you are on. In Search Coach, learners can filter searches by common domains including:
.com (commercial)
.org (organizations, which may or may not be credible)
And institutional domains, which default to American institutions but educators can edit to better represent institutions in their country or region:
.edu (higher education in the US)
.gov (United States government)
In addition, learners can use country and regional domains, allowing them to focus their searches on sites from a particular geographic area.
File type
Learners use the File type filter to find certain types of files in a search, such as PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, or Word documents.
Date range
This tool filters results by how recently Bing discovered a page, helping learners narrow down sources that were discovered in the past 24 hours, week, month, year, or within a custom set date range.
Operators
Operators help make a search more specific.
OR broadens a search to include additional information.
NOT and the minus sign (-) narrow searches by excluding terms that aren’t needed.
AND narrows searches by ensuring all keywords are present in the results.
Quotation marks (” “) return results containing an exact match of a phrase.
There are two more filters that can be set by the educator under Class settings. More than one filter can be applied, but only one of the fact check or custom filters can be enabled at once.
Fact check
A set of objective fact check sites appear under a fifth filter button.
Custom filter
Educators may create a list of domains for learners to search. This tool can be useful for keeping learners focused on a specific subject, supporting them in finding quality sources, or limiting them to age-appropriate websites.
Educators can also engage learners by selecting a background image in Class settings.
Everyone in your organization plays an important role in managing access to information. When adequate access controls aren’t consistently applied, it can result in something we refer to as ‘oversharing.’ Managing access to files and sites will help prevent oversharing in search results, recommended feeds, and more.
In this module, we’ll go over the solutions and controls available to manage access to information on SharePoint, OneDrive, and Delve. We’ll also look at how search entry points, like embedded search boxes and Microsoft Edge work shortcuts, can help users find work or school results faster. Lastly, we’ll discuss feedback and using it to monitor and evaluate the search experience.
Scenario: Suppose the leadership team at a pharmaceuticals company is concerned about sites with sensitive information appearing in search results. To address this, a Search admin has connected with other IT team members to ensure access controls are in place. The communications team is also sharing information about how users can help manage access to files broadly within the company.
Learning objectives
Once you’ve completed this module, you should be able to:
Outline the controls available to manage access to files and sites.
Enable and manage other Microsoft Search entry points.
Microsoft 365 imposes security requirements on Actionable Messages in Outlook senders to prevent unauthorized senders from exploiting users. Microsoft 365 also provides ways for your service to verify that calls to your action endpoints are valid.
Sender requirements
In addition to the registration requirement discussed in the previous unit, email messages that contain Actionable Messages must meet one of the following requirements.
The email message must originate from a server that implements both DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF). These are industry standard ways to prove a sender’s identity when sending emails over SMTP. Many companies already implement these standards to secure the emails they are already sending.
The Actionable Message JSON must be signed using the JSON Web Signature (JWS) standard, using a private key that corresponds to a public key included in your Actionable Message registration.
Protecting your service
All HTTP POST requests sent to your service by Microsoft 365 include a bearer token in the Authorization header. This token is a JSON Web Token (JWT) signed by Microsoft, and it includes important claims that should be verified by the service handling the associated request. By validating this token, you can know that the request is a valid one and that it originated from Microsoft. The token also contains the Microsoft Entra identity of the recipient who initiated the action.
Your service can also require authentication on your action endpoint. You can respond to a POST to your endpoint with an HTTP 401 status and an ACTION-AUTHENTICATE header, specifying a login URL. The Outlook client will use that URL to allow the user to login to your system, and your service can associate the user’s Microsoft Entra identity with your system.
Actionable Messages in Outlook provide a powerful set of capabilities and typically send information outside of the Microsoft 365 service. Because of this, services must register their sender and web API endpoints.
Actionable Email Developer Dashboard
Developers register their solution in the Actionable Email Developer Dashboard. The developer provides the following information.
One or more static email addresses that will be used as the sender for Actionable Messages.
One or more HTTPS URLs that will be invoked by the actions in the message.
The scope of the submission. Scope dictates the set of recipients that can receive Actionable Messages from the solution.
Optionally, the developer can provide a logo for their provider.
Once the registration is created, the developer obtains a provider ID, which is included in the Adaptive Card markup in every message sent by the solution.
Scope of submission
Next steps for the registration process depends on the desired scope of submission.
Test Users
With this scope, the solution is only allowed to send to the specified users. These users must be in the same Microsoft 365 organization as the user creating the registration. This scope is typically used in later stages of development, for more formal testing or beta testing.
This scope requires a list of one or more test user email addresses, and is auto-approved.
Organization
With this scope, the solution is allowed to send to any user in the same Microsoft 365 organization as the user creating the registration. This scope is typically used by line-of-business applications, such as internal expense reporting solutions.
This scope optionally accepts one or more email addresses of users to add to the new registration notification, along with a comment field. The request is sent to the organization’s Exchange administrators for approval.
Global
With this scope, the solution is allowed to send to any Microsoft 365 user. This scope is typically used by ISVs or websites that provide services to multiple customers.
This scope requires additional information, including company information, point of contact, a description of the scenario and actions, and detailed instructions for testing and verifying the solution. The request is sent to Microsoft for testing, validation, and approval.
