Crawl Properties & Managed Properties for my lookup site column's Title. why this is not being managed automatically

Question

I am working on 2 lists inside my sharepoint enterprise server 2013. the list are:-

1. Departments
2. Project

where the Project list have a lookup field (named ProjectDepartment) to the Department list , as follow:-

and inside the Project list i found 2 list columns representing the lookup site column (seems the ProjectDepartment:Title has been created automatically):-

now i am trying to build a content search web part, which will show Projects that are under certain Departments. but my problem is that i am unable to find the related managed property representing the ProjectDepartment loojup column inside the search service.

i search these places:-

1- Central Admin >> Search Service >> Search Schema>> Managed Property>>search for the word "project". i got this , where the ProjectDepartments is not there:-

2- Central Admin >> Search Service >> Search Schema>> crawl properties. i got this , where the ProjectDepartments is there but not sure if this is the one i am searching for also i got Sharepoint:title:-

now what i am looking for is the ProjectDepartment Title inside the Project list ,, so which one i need to use ? and should i manually create a managed property for the lookup field? baring in mind that both the Project & Department lists contain data and i run a full crawl , and i am using SP 2013 where managed properties will be created automatically on all the site columns that contain data,, but seems this is not true when it comes to lookup columns..

Answer 1

ows_ProjectDapartment is very likely the crawled property you are looking for. You will need to manually create the managed property for Lookup column as it is not created automatically.

See this Technet article