SharePoint 2013 – Content Search Web Part (CSWP) VS Content Query Web Part (CQWP)

July 22, 2012 · by Learning SharePoint · in ,

In SharePoint 2013 Microsoft has introduced a new webpart called “Content Search Web Part (CSWP)”.The Content Search Web Part (CSWP) is a Web Part that displays search results based on a search query. The webpart displays search results in a way that you can easily format. In earlier versions of SharePoint a somewhat similar results were achieved using the famous Content Query Web Part (CQWP).

In this post we will look at the main differences between the famous Content Query Web Part (CQWP) and new Content Search Web Part (CSWP). This will help you make decision on when to choose what.

SharePoint 2013 – CSWP Vs CQWP

CSWP CQWP
What is CSWP -
A webpart that displays search results based on a associated search query.		 What is CQWP - A webpart that displays content based on a query or otherwise form the entire site collection.
How does it display Results – The CSWP can return any content from the search index. It queries against the Index to display results. How does it display Results – CQWP return any content from within the site collection based on the filter.
Result Accuracy – The CSWP returns content that is as fresh as the latest crawl of your content, so if you crawl often, the content that the CSWP returns is more up-to-date than if you crawl infrequently. Result Accuracy –
CQWP displays instant content or the refreshed version of content.
Content in Results - Search crawls only the major versions of content, never the minor versions. So no minor version documents are included in results. Content in Results - CQWP on the other hand displays minor versions of your content as well.
Results Availability -
If the site collection or site is marked to not be indexed, the content is not available using CSWP. 		Resource Allocation - If you want to return results from a site that is marked to not index, use the CQWP instead.
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