I wanted to get rid of the Action Links on a standard Search Results page in SharePoint:

So I opened up my search page in SharePoint Designer. This always looks a bit cluttered, but I went to my Core Search Results Web Part to modify it’s ShowActionLinks property.

I’ve scribbled on this to highlight the obvious web parts on the page. The Core Results web part is highlighted in cyan. Anyway, if you look at the code in the top of the screenshot you can see that the ShowActionLinks setting is already False. Eh?

Obviously, I decided to set this ShowActionLinks setting to true to see what happened:

Now there are two action links shown. (Please note, I made some other changes while figuring this out, which is why the results themselves look a bit different). Okay, so clearly, there must be another web part. Rather than look at the pretty pictures in SharePoint Designer, I looked at the rather more useful code and found:

That’s right, there is a second Core Results web part, which is nearly invisible in the Design view of SharePoint Designer. This web part’s XSL doesn’t actually process the Results nodes of the search results – so it doesn’t show any results (which kind of belies it’s name as the ‘Core Results’ web part). Instead, it just shows the action links.

Frustratingly, the second Core Results web part is very obvious if you edit the page in the browser:

I deleted that web part from my page, and the action links vanished. I guess the question that this leaves is why are the action links not in their own web part? After all, it’s not called the ‘Core Results and Action Links’ web part is it? It rather appears that they would nicely sit as their own web part.