Prevent a list or library from appearing in Search

The default behaviour for SharePoint is that the Search Indexer will crawl all content added to the system, meaning that content can be found using the search bar in the M365 header.

In Atlas, all content is crawled because of that SharePoint behaviour, but In Focus web parts will only return content when it uses one of the Atlas content types.

Please note that permissions do not affect the Search behaviour, but will of course affect the results a specific user will see when the content is crawled.

Therefore there are two ways to hide content from Search. If it is acceptable to hide the content only from the Atlas In Focus web parts and therefore you don't need the Atlas metadata you can set up a library which uses the out of the box content types instead. If content needs to be prevented from being crawled at all then the list or library can be excluded from Search entirely.

Prevent content being crawled by Search

1. Go to the workspace containing the content you want to exclude from Search and go to Site contents
2. Click the ellipsis (...) next to the relevant list or library and choose Settings
3. In the first column, click on Advanced settings
   
   
4. Find the Search heading and set the following option to "No":
   
5. Next time the Search crawl looks at this library the content will be removed from the Search Index and you won't be able to find it in either Atlas or SharePoint searches.

Hide content from In Focus web parts only

Please note that this cannot be done for Pages because only a single Pages library per workspace is supported by SharePoint.

1. Go to the workspace containing the content you want to exclude from In Focus web parts and go to Site contents
2. Create a new List or Document Library - whichever is used for the source content. This will be using whatever is the out of the box content type from SharePoint - List Item or Document - and therefore will not appear in In Focus web parts by default.
3. Move your content from the Atlas list or library into the new one. Remember that you will lose the Atlas metadata set against the content.
4. Next time the Search crawl looks at this workspace the content will no longer appear in In Focus web parts, but it could still be found using Microsoft Search or using a customised query.