Site columns not showing in managed properties, although they are searchable

Question

In SharePoint Online, I have created a site column, added data to that column, and reindexed.

It is a text column named EfipsWhatever, so it should generate a managed property named EfipsWhateverOWSTEXT. And I can indeed find the list item if I issue a search for EfipsWhateverOWSTEXT and even add EfipsWhateverOWSTEXT to the selected properties (see FIGURE A below).

The problem is, however, that I can't find the property EfipsWhateverOWSTEXT in the Managed Properties of the schema for the site or the site collection. And if I try mapping a RefinableString*, I can't find the property, either.

This ought to be a no-brainer. Am I missing something, or has the implementation of this feature changed?

I should note that I have repeated this exercise on 3 different tenants, and the result is the same in all cases.

FIGURE A - this search query works: https://[SITE_NAME]/_api/search/query?querytext='EfipsWhateverOWSTEXT:Tinge*'&selectproperties='Title,ListItemID,EfipsWhateverOWSTEXT'

FIGURE B - part of the search result containing EfipsWhateverOWSTEXT <d:element m:type="SP.KeyValue"> <d:Key>EfipsWhateverOWSTEXT</d:Key> <d:Value>Tingelingelater</d:Value> <d:ValueType>Edm.String</d:ValueType> </d:element>

Answer 1

Microsoft has some issues with the search engine on serveral tenants where crawled properties are not being created. The current respons is that the Sharepoint team is testing a hotfix and plan to roll this out around the 18th

See SP148979 for details