Result Sources were introduced in SharePoint 2013 first as the alternate of search Scopes from SharePoint 2010. With the help of Result Sources, SharePoint search can be configured in more established way. Even in SharePoint Server 2019 Public Preview, the modern search experience gets its results from the default result source. If we change the default result source, it will impact the modern search experiences as well as the classic one.
Result Source is a subset of specific type of content which are being used to limit search results. It can be used for Content Type or Sub-site.
List of default SharePoint Result Source IDs
Although the Result Source feature in SharePoint is cool, writing queries against them is not. Previously with scopes, these could be specified by name (i.e.: All Sites or People), but with result sources, must be specified by the id. That’s made it tricky to develop custom coded solutions. Luckily, it turns out that the IDs of the built-in result sources are all the same except for the Conversations result source. In comparing an on-premises installation of SharePoint 2013 with a SharePoint Online Preview tenant, here is the list I came up with. Hopefully, it will save some time to write a query.
| Result Source | ID |
| Documents | e7ec8cee-ded8-43c9-beb5-436b54b31e84 |
| Items matching a content type | 5dc9f503-801e-4ced-8a2c-5d1237132419 |
| Items matching a tag | e1327b9c-2b8c-4b23-99c9-3730cb29c3f7 |
| Items related to current user | 48fec42e-4a92-48ce-8363-c2703a40e67d |
| Items with same keyword as this item | 5c069288-1d17-454a-8ac6-9c642a065f48 |
| Local People Results | b09a7990-05ea-4af9-81ef-edfab16c4e31 |
| Local Reports and Data Results | 203fba36-2763-4060-9931-911ac8c0583b |
| Local SharePoint Results | 8413cd39-2156-4e00-b54d-11efd9abdb89 |
| Local Video Results | 78b793ce-7956-4669-aa3b-451fc5defebf |
| Pages | 5e34578e-4d08-4edc-8bf3-002acf3cdbcc |
| Pictures | 38403c8c-3975-41a8-826e-717f2d41568a |
| Popular | 97c71db1-58ce-4891-8b64-585bc2326c12 |
| Recently changed items | ba63bbae-fa9c-42c0-b027-9a878f16557c |
| Recommended Items | ec675252-14fa-4fbe-84dd-8d098ed74181 |
| Wiki | 9479bf85-e257-4318-b5a8-81a180f5faa1 |
Using Default Result source
Above result source are being able to use at the Search service application level, site collection level, or site level. To search in the result source, there are four protocols specified which are Local SharePoint, Remote SharePoint, OpenSearch 1.0/1.1, Exchange. Other than “Local SharePoint” protocol, need to specify a URL to get search result from Result Source.
| Protocol Name | URL Details |
| Remote SharePoint | The address of the root site collection of the remote SharePoint Server farm |
| OpenSearch 1.0/1.1 | The URL of the RSS feed of a search provider that uses the OpenSearch protocol |
| Exchange | An Exchange Web Services URL |
Conclusion
As a developer point of view, these predefined Result source can be used to minimize the effort in different type of search query. And by creating custom result source will help to get required query execution in a minimal effort.
Points of Interest
This article has used the following articles or blogs as source of information: Understanding result sources for search in SharePoint Server