SharePoint Crawled Properties and Managed Properties

Last year, when I had an interview, I was asked the difference between crawled property and managed property. Though I have come across this multiple times and even after working on Search Project, I could not give a satisfactory answer.(honestly ,even for me the answer was not satisfactory)

So what is Crawled Property and Managed Property in SharePoint ???

Crawled Properties and Managed Properties are very basic SharePoint concepts but they are building elements of SharePoint Search. Below is an example which might help you understand this in a better way.

SharePoint crawls data from different sources. The data in these various source systems have metadata which can have different names but it refers to the same information.

As an example different systems can store the information about the Author in various systems with the name as :

Author

Created By

Writer

Owner

and in case of emails it is stored in field From.

But all these fields represent the same information which represent who has created this.

Now when SharePoint crawl these various systems , all these properties become Crawled Properties.

In SharePoint we can group all these Crawled Properties under one Managed Properties.

The below image is a pictorial representation of what I said above.

Note

One crawled property can be part of multiple Managed Properties.

Managed property can be used in scopes, refiners..etc.