SharePoint 2013 Result Source Only Include Content From Current Site NOT Sub Sites

Hello Blog Readers,

Sorry for the delay in posts recently things at work in terms of projects, but I did have an extremely helpful Result Source Syntax you should know!  From the title of this blog article you have probably guessed what I will discuss, how to actually only search on the current site!

I can’t believe how many copy and paste blogs are out there since everyone’s “solution” of Path:{Site} or Path:{Site.URL} does not work!  I was so frustrated after clicking through pages of Google links (dear god I made it to page 3… where results go to die) that I just sat down and tried to figure out a solution myself.

For those of you who don’t want the journey or explanation the key to your success is to include this as part of your query:

WebId={Site.ID}

Why is The Path Solution Incorrect?

The Path solution is incorrect since Path:{Site} will include any content from your sub sites which matches the criteria.  This is because the child sites includes the path of the parent site, which means you will always get the data from the sub sites which inherit from the parent’s Path.  You may be thinking well Dan, why don’t you just use Path={Site} instead of contains.  If you have tried this syntax on its own, you most likely only received the Home Page of the site from which you were running the query from.  Content within the site obviously does not have the URL of the homepage, so using equals will only return the one page which matches the path exactly.  In short, you can use Path:{Site} when you are trying to exclude contents from parent sites, but include content from the current site and it’s children.

How to Return Results ONLY From the Current Site:

To only obtain results from the site from which the query is being run, WebId={Site.ID} should be used.  WebId is an out of the box managed property which houses the site’s GUID  / ID, so essentially what we are saying in the above is that we want to only return items where the WebId is equal to the current site’s GUID/ID from which the query is being issued from.

Simple Example Query:

SPContentType=”Item” AND WebId={Site.ID}

This query will only retrieve items which match the item content type display name and where the WebId is equal to the current sites GUID / ID.  If you were to try this same query from a top level site utilizing Path:{Site} instead of WebId, like the other blogs and sites suggest, you will retrieve Items with this content type from all of the sub sites beneath this path.  The query above will ONLY return items from the current site J

Best of Luck!

Dan