I work with SharePoint Search from some time now. Since many clients need assistance on Search optimization KQL is one of my best mates. Especially XRANK is very powerful function that leverage KQL capabilities but also enlarge its complexity. Anyway I feel quite sure about what we can achieve using KQL and how. However last week a colleague of mine asked me about what is proper syntax of XRANK in REST search query…and I was like “emmm…”.

There are many not obvious questions – which characters need to be encoded? Is the syntax the same as in common KQL query?

I did quick documentation check as well as googling for an answer but there was no satisfying results at all (if there is no answer in Stack Overflow the web contains no answer).

So this post is about clarification for XRANK syntax in REST API calls.

Use Search Query Tool

The old sentence says “Do not break open doors”. That’s why I did not investigate topic by myself trying different REST queries to SP Search. Instead I used great great great tool called Search Query Tool. It really makes your work with search easier and faster. You can build any kind of KQL query in it and it will be translated to REST query because it uses it to communicate with SharePoint.

So for instance if you want to execute following KQL query

*  XRANK(cb=1) Position:Manager

Its REST equivalent will be:

<SearchEndpointURL>?querytext=’*+XRANK(cb%3d1)+Position:Manager’

As you can see syntax is the same as in common KQL query however ‘=’ character has been encoded to URI format in order to be properly understood by browser and endpoint and any spaces has been replaced by “+”.

Complex XRANK queries

Remember that in order to build you must remember about proper use of parenthesis. For instance if you want to make multiple XRANK boosts you need to arrange them in following way:

(SearchQuery XRANK(cb=1) condition1) XRANK(cb=1) condition2

In other words, if you want to add boosting for position AND for date freshness your KQL will look like below:

(* XRANK(cb=1) Position:Manager) XRANK(cb=0.5) LastModifiedTime>{Today-365}

and your REST query text will be like following:

querytext='(*+XRANK(cb%3d1)+Position:Manager)+XRANK(cb%3d0.5)+LastModifiedTime>{Today-30}’

which gives you following results:

• results older than 30 days and for person that position does not contain “Manager” in its name will get 0 ranking points
• results modified less than 30 days ago and for person that position does contain “Manager” in its name will get 0.5 ranking points
• results older than 30 days and for person that position does contain “Manager” in its name will get 1 ranking points
• results modified less than 30 days ago and for person that position does not contain “Manager” in its name will get 1.5 ranking points

Hope it helps you in using XRANK and KQL in REST API queries.

Thanks & have a great day!