Is there a Central Search in SP Online?

Question

In our Dev environment, I can see the search results by default go to a page within the site I did the search, for example:

https://company.sharepoint.com/sites/SiteName/_layouts/15/search.aspx

Now, in the client environment they have a different site for the the search results:

https://company.sharepoint.com/search/Pages/results.aspx

This site was created even before we migrated the SP 2013 On-Prem to Online. It was configured in the OnPrem to search in the cloud.

So I was thinking I could create a Search Site from a kind of Search Site template, and then associate the search results to it from the sites I want.

I looked for that in SharePoint Admin but could not find any Search Site template.

Maybe it needs to be created from Office 365 Admin center?

Answer 1

In SharePoint Online, there will be a search site collection created. URL of the site collection is in below format. Try hitting this URL in browser tab:

https://tenant.sharepoint.com/search

Also check below documentations which will help you to configure search:

1. Custom Search Center
2. Manage the Search Center in SharePoint

Answer 2

You can use the existing modern search results page in your site that exists at this url:

https://yourtenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/yoursitename/_layouts/15/search.aspx?q=hello

You can redirect users to this page and replacing the q query param with the actual term you want them to search for.

For example, if you want them to search for people instead, you will use this:

https://yourtenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/yoursitename/_layouts/15/search.aspx/people?q=Jose

Each tab in that page corresponds to a specific URL that you can use.