The new Microsoft Search API (preview) has been available in the Graph beta endpoint for a while now. If you haven't had a chance to look at the API yet, the docs explain it quite nicely:
"The Microsoft Search API provides one unified search endpoint that you can use to query data in the Microsoft cloud - messages and events in Outlook mailboxes, and files on OneDrive and SharePoint - that Microsoft Search already indexes."
![]()
And it's also currently planned that Microsoft Teams search will also be transitioned to use Microsoft Search in the future: https://twitter.com/williambaer/status/1273644094904872960
Considering everything, it looks like Microsoft Search will play an important role in Microsoft 365 solutions going forward. Given this, I decided to check out the Graph API .NET SDK late last year to try and search SharePoint files. But quickly stumbled on a roadblock which did not allow the API to work with the SDK: https://github.com/microsoftgraph/msgraph-beta-sdk-dotnet/issues/43
Fortunately, the issue was fixed recently and we are able to use the .NET Graph SDK for testing.
The code:
Let's see how can we search SharePoint Online content using the new Microsoft Search API:
For this code to work, you will need the Microsoft.Graph.Beta nuget package:
We are going to use the KQL sytax with the Microsoft Graph Search API to query SharePoint Modern pages in a tenant. Once the query completes, we will display the page name and page url in the console:
Considerations:
Although it works great, there are a few considerations currently:
- The API only works with delegated access for now i.e. with a user context. Application permissions are not supported.
- When searching SharePoint Online content, we are not able to specify fields to return in the result. Only a default set of fields can be returned.
- There is no custom sorting available as of now when it comes to SharePoint content. The content is sorted by default by relevance.
Hope you found this post useful and helps you get started with the Microsoft Search API. To read up more on the Microsoft Search API in Graph, have a look here: