Copilot killed Microsoft Search

Search is the one thing that should just work, to give users the feeling that they are in control of their information (at least on some level). Whenever we aren’t passively consuming information that’s coming at us via messages and feeds, we usually perform searches. For documents, photos, sites - any kind of raw material that we the information workers need for producing new outputs.

People even tend to launch apps and portals via entering the names into a Google search bar. It’s the “wrong” way to use a web browser, yet so often it works better than navigation. You don’t have to learn the internal structures of the hundreds of different portal/app UIs if a web search will just take you there. Thanks to this, Google managed to become the unified access point to the web - instead of Microsoft who merely built the operating systems and applications for information work.

Microsoft of course did attempt to build their own gateway into the web with Bing. One valid reason someone could have been using Bing instead of Google search was its integration with the internal Office documents. You know, clicking the “Work” tab in Bing search results and getting to view what matching content there was in your M365 tenant.

In the Microsoft Search page that opened, you were able to see content from the usual places like SharePoint and Teams. The idea of a universal search engine that covered not just the public web but also your organization’s internal information sources seemed attractive. Instead of first having to open a specific data silo and use its proprietary search tools, MS Search “just worked”.

Not many knew that you were able to include records from your CRM in these results, too. The feature wasn’t widely advertised and basically required the tenant admins to find out about it from the documentation pages: Dataverse and Dynamics 365 results in Microsoft Search.

I was pretty excited about this at first. I had seen how users were often gravitating towards viewing and commenting on customer related data through Teams, rather than going to the authoritative source of Dynamics 365. It was “a click too far” for many. Yet if the search results everywhere in M365 (including Teams) presented the matching records from the Dataverse database, that excuse could no longer be used.

In 2022 when the feature became generally available, I explored this and the other search capabilities within Dataverse on my blog. In addition to showing how the MS Search integration worked, I wanted to put it into the perspective of other search features available for users and developers of Dataverse.

I was generally happy with how the unified search experience worked. It wasn’t fancy, but that was the whole point. The reason Google became such a big, dominating force on the internet was in the way they managed to index pretty much all the world’s digital information and make it available in one, simple UI.

Considering how simple it was to set up the MS Search integration with Dataverse using the built-in features, I saw surprisingly few people talk about it. This lead me to believe that it wasn’t a widely known feature - and as a result, probably didn’t show up high in the internal metrics for Microsoft product teams either.

In December 2024 it was announced that Microsoft Search in Bing will be deprecated. This removed one entry point into the unified search experience. Given how Bing had been reimagined as a gateway to AI tools, it wasn’t all that surprising. Microsoft had new plans for these assets. At the time, Tony Redmond wrote a great article about how there’s no room for Microsoft Search in Bing in a world increasingly dominated by Copilot:

In January 2025, the next victim to be deprecated was announced. Yes, you’ve guessed it by now. In a message (MC980795) sent only to the current users of the feature, Microsoft said that “as a part of modernizing our search extensibility platform, we are retiring the support for federated search providers in Microsoft Search.” The casualty here is the Dynamics 365 / Dataverse search feature:

It feels disappointing to think that Microsoft can’t be bothered to offer such a basic ability of connecting M365 and D365 services together. ”Better together”, yeah right… I mean, the technical capability of searching through the contents of Dataverse with what MS Search has in place isn't going away. Instead, MS is suggesting customers to rebuild things on their own:

I guess the Microsoft team who wrote that message forgot about the Bing integration deprecation from December already. Well, who can blame them for not keeping up with all these changes.

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