M365 Search by Author

How to search documents by author in Microsoft 365

I found an interesting behaviou detail while using SharePoint KQL to search documents created by a specific person. Let say you use a search query like “Author=John”.

Microsoft says that it “Returns content items authored by John Smith” Microsoft KQL. What does that mean “authored”?. There are two properties at every item - “Created By” and “Modified By” (no “Authored By”) and a history of document versions. So I used to interpret this as “created or updated by John”.

It turned out - by “Author=John” search returns only documents created by John or last updated (last modified) by John. So the search ignores document updates history and uses only document “final” (or current) version metadata.