Search within SharePoint Online Site for External Users

Question

Be given a SharePoint Online Modern website with 25 pages. The complete website is shared with external users over external Mail Address (Microsoft Account).

If external users use the search box on the top right corner (searching for *) they will only see 16 results. The results are libraries/lists and images from SiteAssets only. No pages are returned. No documents are returned.

Internal users can search all site contents. The issue is related to external users only.

Anyone experienced an issue like that? Is there a way to enable external search on the pages library? Search is enabled in the library settings of site pages.

EDIT: Seems to be by design. PLEASE UPVOTE ON USERVOICE TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM, THANKS: https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/330321-sharepoint-search/suggestions/39040270-external-users-should-be-able-to-search-pages-and

Answer 1

I can reproduce this issue in my environment.

When I search as a site Administrator, it returns 720 results on the result page. But when I search as an external user, it only returns 14 results, all of which are images and OneNote files.

It seems the default behavior SharePoint Online, even when the external user is granted with Edit permission in the site. Searching directly in the document library or using a Search Result web part leads to the same result.

Answer 2

Do the external users have permissions to the pages library? They will only see search results for items that they have permissions to.