Why Does SharePoint Search Feel Broken? Why can’t employees find what they need?

Why does SharePoint search feel broken?

SharePoint search isn’t broken. It’s just old. It was built to match keywords against indexed content and hand back a ranked list of links, the same model web search used in 2005. That works fine when you know the exact document title you’re looking for. It falls apart the moment an employee types a real question like “what’s our parental leave policy” instead of “parental leave policy.docx.”

Microsoft has been patching this with Copilot Search inside M365 Copilot, a $30/user/month add-on layered on top of an existing Copilot license and scoped to general M365 knowledge work rather than intranet-specific search. Platforms like Glean take a different approach: they index everything across dozens or hundreds of SaaS connectors, which is genuinely useful if your knowledge is scattered across many unrelated vendors. That breadth comes with enterprise-level pricing and a setup built around your entire tech stack though, not SharePoint intranet content specifically.

Neither approach was built to answer the question intranet teams care about: when an employee searches your SharePoint intranet, do they find the answer, or do they give up?

What does “smarter search” mean for an intranet?

1. The search understands what people type, not just the words in a document title.
2. The results answer the question instead of making the employee open five tabs to figure it out themselves.
3. Someone can measure whether search is working, instead of guessing.

Here’s how each of those plays out inside SearchHub and eliminates the question – Why does SharePoint Search feel broken to so many users?

How does SearchHub understand what people type?

Employees don’t search the way SharePoint expects them to. They type real questions, like “how do I submit an expense report,” not document titles or exact keywords. SearchHub reads that kind of natural-language question and turns it into a search that returns the right results, without the employee needing to know anything about how SharePoint search works underneath.

Search spans four scopes: Intranet, SharePoint/Teams, OneDrive, or Everything. It also filters out the noise every SharePoint deployment builds up over time, like dev sites, template pages, internal system lists, and config data, so employees see real content instead of clutter.

What does an AI Overview do with search results?

Instead of returning ten blue links and leaving the employee to figure out which one has the answer, SearchHub’s AI Overview reads the top results and generates a direct, cited answer to the question. It reads closer to a Perplexity-style answer than a traditional SharePoint search page.

The answer is grounded entirely in the organization’s own indexed content. Sources are cited underneath it, and employees can thumbs up or down the response, which gets logged for admin review.

Can employees interact with individual documents, not just search results?

Every eligible result, whether it’s a PDF, a Word doc, or a SharePoint page, gets three AI actions attached to it. SearchHub supports documents up to 100 MB, so these work on lengthy policy manuals and reports, not just short memos.

• Summarize generates a plain-English summary of that specific document, streamed in real time.
• FAQ generates up to three likely Q&A pairs from the document’s content, useful on HR policies and procedures where employees usually have a follow-up question anyway.
• Chat opens a multi-turn conversation scoped to that document. An employee can ask “what does this policy say about parental leave,” follow up with “what about adoption,” and the system remembers the thread.

How do admins know if search is working?

SearchHub’s admin dashboard tracks:

Every AI feature has an editable system prompt, so admins can tune tone and focus without code changes. Search Managers, not IT, can promote specific results to the top of relevant searches through Best Bets, directly from the results page.

What makes SearchHub different from other AI search tools?

Two things stand out beyond the SharePoint-native positioning already covered above. SearchHub runs on multiple AI model providers behind the scenes (Azure OpenAI, Claude, Grok), so there’s no dependency on a single AI vendor if pricing or availability shifts. It also runs entirely inside your own Azure tenant through Managed Identity rather than a third party’s cloud, so there’s no separate data-processing agreement to negotiate.

SearchHub isn’t the right fit for every situation, to be clear. If your organization needs to search across dozens of unrelated platforms like Salesforce, Slack, Jira, and Google Drive, a broader enterprise search tool built for that scope will serve you better than a SharePoint-native product.

What to do next

If your organization is struggling with finding relevant information quickly or if SharePoint search feels broken – start by auditing your content and permissions. Identify the content that multiple departments need and the current owners (or lack of owners).Start looking into enabling AI to help supercharge your users and Explore hubley’s SearchHub

If you want to see how a modern SharePoint intranet can serve a better knowledge experience, schedule a short demo. hubley will walk through the platform, the typical four-to-eight-week implementation, and how hubley Green support and quarterly releases keep the experience current.

Schedule a demo at hubley.com

FAQ