In SharePoint Search,  the three key terms you need to understand are Managed, Crawled and Refinable Property. SharePoint search in a nutshell is based on crawling the database content and indexing and publishing the search results.you can compare SharePoint Search to google. Basically, Crawling, Indexing, Displaying is key to any search engine. Microsoft SharePoint Search involves all of them.

Crawled Property:-

Crawled Properties are nothing but the metadata column identified during Crawling. The metadata information such as Author, Title, URL are primary example for Crawled Properties. Crawled property takes the form of OWX_XX_columnname.

Managed Property:-

SharePoint 2013 automatically created Managed Properties.  You can do search through Managed Properties only. In General, all the site colums are automatically considered as Managed Property. A single Managed Property is mapped to one or more crawled properties. It is always one to many mapping relationships.Managed Property takes the form of OWX_Columnname

Refinable Property:-

We can map any managed Property to Refinable Property. Refinable properties are used for refinable navigation. They are used to filter search results based on few refinable column. Crawl Mapping is done to map few managed properties to act as refinable property. The following are default Managed Properties that are refinable by default.

• RefinableDate00 – RefinableDate19
• RefinableDecimal00 – RefinableDecimal09
• RefinableDouble00 – RefinableDouble09 
• RefinableInt00 – RefinableInt49
• RefinableString00 – RefinableString99

Please read my Article on adding a new crawled property through Powershell.

Please read my Article on Create Managed Property in Sharepoint 2013 using Powershell

Please read my Article on User Information List in SharePoint 2013

 

Happy SharePointing 🙂