Just a little titbit for anyone that finds when they perform a search in SharePoint 2010 a refiner doesn’t show, but it does for other searches even though keywords are in results of both searches.  This issue was just pointed out on our Intranet for People Searches.

This may be caused by the MetadataThreshold setting for individual refiners in the Refinement Panel.

  • So edit your search results page
  • Edit your Refinement Panel web part settings
  • Edit the Filter Category Definition text

RefinementPanel

  • Change the MetadataThreshold setting for whichever refiner you are having a problem with from it’s current value to less than the number of search results you have.  In my case it was 3 results.  But I changed the value to 1.

FilterCatDef1

  • You may also want to change your NumberOfFiltersToDisplay and MaxNumberOfFilters values depending on how many times the refiner keyword appears within search results.  In my case we have over 200 departments so for some searches not all department names were showing for the particular search results.
  • Save the settings and your page and try your search again,  you should now see the refiner