The Search Explained Yammer network is a great place to ask the weird and quirky search questions. Unfortunately it’s not indexed by Google, so answers there will not benefit everyone – which is why I’m writing this post.
A couple of days ago someone posted a question if it was possible to find pages in SharePoint which contain a specific link. The need was to identify broken links. Use-case can be if you rename a file, and want to find all pages linking to that file before renaming – to make sure they still point correctly.
This post will show you one approach which works, and if you have a better suggestion, please let me know.
Question is; how can you go about finding a page with the link https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/collection/site/library/document.docx as part of the content?
Both KQL and FQL has a bunch of operators you can use, and turns out if you employ the use of the ONEAR operator with a proximity of 0, it works. Let me explain.
The ONEAR operator is used to say that a specific term has to follow after another term in the right order, and within n number of terms.
cat ONEAR(n=2) dog, would match cat hey yo dog, as you allow two terms to go in between. You can read the official KQL and FQL syntaxes for ONEAR at:
- FQL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-development/fast-query-language-fql-syntax-reference#fql_onear_operator
- KQL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-development/keyword-query-language-kql-syntax-reference#onear-operator
The KQL syntax in this case is very quirky as you need to nest the ONEAR operators for each term you want to follow after each other – and you and up with this:
(((((((((https ONEAR(n=0) contoso) ONEAR(n=0) sharepoint) ONEAR(n=0) com) ONEAR(n=0) sites) ONEAR(n=0) collection) ONEAR(n=0) site) ONEAR(n=0) library) ONEAR(n=0) document) ONEAR(n=0) docx)
If you search programmatically you can take advantage of the fact that the refinement filter query parameter is actually an FQL statement. By passing in the below FQL as a refinement filter you will achieve the same as the above KQL:
onear(https, contoso, sharepoint, com, sites, collection, site, library, document, docx, N=0)
Refinement filters are also not limited to the query length of the search field with KQL.
I would advise against having too many URL’s in one query as performance will probably degrade a lot – but this solution might just help someone who really really need it.
