Cloud Search Service Application - No Results Returned from On-Premises Search Center

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The Cloud Search Service Application is a brilliant new-ish feature of SharePoint 2013 and 2016 that allows you to store your On-Premises search index in Office 365. My colleagues Manas Biswas and Neil Hodgkinson have written a fantastic guide on how to set this up here.

When I setup the Cloud SSA for the first time I run into an issue whereby I could retrieve search results from the SharePoint Online Search Center, which included items from both On-Premises and SharePoint Online, however when I submitted a search query via my On-Premises Search Center no results were returned - even from On-Premises!

It turns out there is an additional step required, I'm documenting this here as as I know others that have run into this too.

Here are the steps to rectify this:

  1. Launch Central Administration
  2. Select Manage Service Applications
  3. Select the Cloud SSA that you have provisioned
  4. Select Result Sources
  5. Click New Result Source
  6. Give it an appropriate name, select Remote SharePoint for the Protocol
  7. Within the Remote Service URL enter the URL of the top-level Site Collection for your tenant (e.g. https://tenant.sharepoint.com)
  8. Click Save
  9. Right click the new result source that you have just created and select Set as Default

That should hopefully sort it out for you :)

Brendan Griffin - @brendankarl