Today I want to talk about something I’ve been quietly obsessed with for years:
Why SharePoint Online search often feels random to humans, even though under the hood it’s a rigorously consistent, Azure-scale, zero-trust system that we simply haven’t learned to explain properly.
I finally wrote it all down in one place:
Rahsi Search™ in SharePoint Online | Architecture, Indexing Delays and the Illusion of Inconsistent Results
This piece is a deep technical dive into how modern SharePoint search really behaves, especially when you look at it through the lens of distributed systems and zero-trust:
- How the SharePoint Online crawl + indexing pipeline behaves in a multi-tenant, cloud-first world
- Why indexing delays and eventual consistency are design tradeoffs, not bugs that Microsoft “just hasn’t fixed yet”
- How security trimming, Azure AD and contextual ranking naturally produce different results for different users — by design
- Why Microsoft Search and Copilot can only be as trustworthy as your information architecture, metadata discipline and governance model
- How to explain all of this to business stakeholders without blaming the Microsoft stack or flattening permissions “just to make search work” — and instead focusing on where we, as architects and builders, need to improve
My goal with Rahsi Search™ is not to complain about search, but to offer a mental model that architects, engineers, M365 admins and Copilot practitioners can actually use in real projects and conversations.
If you work in the Microsoft 365 / SharePoint / Azure ecosystem, I’d genuinely love your feedback — especially where you disagree or have seen different behavior in the field. That’s exactly where the next iteration of this thinking will come from.
Read the full article:
https://www.aakashrahsi.online/post/rahsi-search-in-sharepoint-online
Top comments (0)