If you have been working with SharePoint Search, you might have noticed a weird behavior with the highlighting search string feature. We discovered that we were unable to consistently get the highlighted keyword in the search results summary. Sometimes it would show up, sometimes not… and this would happen especially with items containing a lot of content. I opened a ticket with Microsoft to get more information on this behavior and to see if there would be a way to fix this or go around it. Unfortunately there is none according to them.
This is clearly a bug because you would expect the search to systematically find and highlight the keyword in the search results but according to Microsoft, this behavior is by design. The summary size is limited to 1000 words, explaining why the highlighted keyword will not appear if it is located beyond those 1000 words in columns or documents. The summary size was limited to search only 1000 words so that it would not negatively impact the property store database.
