Crawled Properties And Managed Properties

Crawled Properties and Managed Properties are very basic SharePoint concepts but they are core to SharePoint Search. Many times I have seen people are not clear with this so I will try to explain them in a simple manner.

As we all know that SharePoint can crawl data from different sources. The data in these various source system have metadata which can have different name but it refers to the same information. As an example different systems can store the information about the Author in various system with the name as Author, Created By, Writer, Owner, and in case of emails it stored in the field From. But all these field represent the same information which represent who has created this.

Now when SharePoint crawl these various system all these properties become Crawled Properties. In SharePoint we can group all these Crawled Properties under one Managed Property:

The below figure will help you to understand the above:

Also one crawled property can be part of multiple Managed Properties.

Now this Managed Property can be used in scopes, refiners etc. This simplifies the whole management of the Metadata with SharePoint search.