SharePoint 2010 Feature Changes Document Titles in Search Results

SharePoint 2010 has a interesting feature which you may not know about. It's called Optimistic Title. It's part of the Office Search engine within SharePoint. What it does is determine a new, hopefully more relevant title for your documents to be displayed in your search results based on document properties or the actual contents of the document (i.e. Text within the file). As you might expect this is closely tied to the Office document formats such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, and Visio. Your end users may report that the titles that they see for search results differ greatly from the file name or the actual title of the document. This is particularly evident with PowerPoint files where the name of the first slide is often used. The behavior is not entirely predictable. Different results can be expected from Office 2007 and Office 2010 created files and even those created in earlier versions of Microsoft Office.

If you want to change this functionality you need to actually go and edit the registry on your Search role server(s) within your SharePoint farm, restart the osearch14 service and then do a full crawl. The key you want to modify is the EnableOptimisticTitleOverride. The default setting is 1. Change it to 0 to disable the feature.