OneDrive knowledge base indexes OneNote notebooks outside the selected folder

Q&A
, ,
1

When I create a knowledge base from the OneDrive source and select a single folder, it also indexes OneNote notebooks stored elsewhere in my OneDrive, in folders I never selected. If the space is shared, those notebook pages become searchable by everyone it’s shared with.

Steps to reproduce

  1. In Quick on the web, create a space and add a knowledge base from the OneDrive source.
  2. In the folder picker, select only one folder (mine held about 50 Markdown files).
  3. Wait for the first sync to finish.
  4. Search for content that exists only in a OneNote notebook in a different OneDrive folder.

Expected: only files from the selected folder are indexed.

Actual

  • The knowledge base reported about 95 items for a folder of about 50 files.
  • In 10 test searches, over half the results came from an unselected OneNote notebook.
  • It happened again with a second, newly created knowledge base. Deleting and re-creating the space didn’t fix it.
  • The result links open OneNote on the web to an empty notebook homepage, so it’s easy for a space owner not to notice.
  • The notebook isn’t on my PC. It exists only in the cloud copy of my OneDrive.

Control: the same folder added through the SharePoint source indexed cleanly. All results came from the selected folder, none from the notebook.

Why it matters

  • Privacy: someone scoping a knowledge base to a team folder doesn’t expect personal notebooks to be shared with it, and setup gives no warning.
  • Answer quality: agents built on the space answer from personal notes as well as the curated folder.

Workaround: build the knowledge base from the SharePoint source if the folder lives in a SharePoint library. Before sharing a space, run a few searches and check where the results come from.

Suggested fixes

  1. Apply the selected-folder scope to OneNote content too.
  2. Let owners see the list of indexed items or source paths before sharing.

Happy to share knowledge base IDs and exact test results with the Quick team. Feel free to reach out.

2

Hi @zhaolus and welcome to the Quick Community!

Thank you for the detailed writeup and the control test! From what I have been able to research, nothing in the docs explains this. The OneDrive user-managed setup page says you pick the files or folders to index during setup. It doesn’t say OneNote gets crawled separately or give you a way to exclude it. It does show that the sign-in requests Notes.Read.All along with Files.Read.All, and the admin-managed setup page says OneNote is only indexed through user-managed setup. So OneNote content getting indexed is expected, but it ignoring your folder selection isn’t documented behavior.

On privacy, user-managed knowledge bases don’t enforce OneDrive permissions, so anyone who can use the knowledge base can see everything it indexed. Admin-managed setup isn’t a fix either, since it crawls every user’s OneDrive and doesn’t let you pick folders. Before sharing, check the All items list on the Sync reports tab (Sync reports and observability) rather than relying on test searches. It lists every item processed in a sync and can be downloaded as a CSV, though it shows titles rather than paths.

Since this can expose personal data and the cause isn’t documented, I’d open an AWS Support case (Case management). Both of your suggested fixes make good feature requests. Until this is fixed, the SharePoint source is the safest choice for folders in a SharePoint library.