The algorithm of search relevance
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What is search relevance?
Search relevance refers to the degree to which search results are relevant and useful to the user's search query. In other words, is a measure of how well the search engine has understood the user's intent and provided results that match their needs and expectations.
If a user performs a search on your website, it's crucial to ensure that the search results are highly pertinent to the user. To achieve this, Boost’s search engine evaluates the search queries and provides results that are ranked according to how well they match the query, with the most relevant results appearing first. The ranking of relevance is influenced by multiple factors.
- Note: This feature is only available for App Lib V3, please contact us for further instructions.
How to set up the search’s relevancy?
The way an eCommerce site displays products for a query or which products get displayed relies highly on the relevancy setup.
Every search is processed through two steps:
- Identifying the products that are relevant to the query that was typed
- Ranking the relevant product attributes to display the most suitable ones on the page
Note: Boost relevancy settings involve defining searchable attributes, providing exact match keywords, adding attribute filters, mapping catalog fields to boost fields, and identifying user intent.
Search settings configuration
The order in which you prioritize product attributes in searchability has a significant impact on the search results. This means that the ranking of product attributes determines how products are displayed when a search is run based on those attributes. The higher an attribute is ranked, the more it influences the order of products in the search results.
For instance, if the search query is for "pink" and the attribute "color" is given a high priority ranking while "product title" is ranked medium, then a product that matches with the "color" attribute will be ranked higher in the search results page than a product that matches with the "product title" attribute.
- Searchable fields: When you define a product attribute as a searchable field, it will be searched when a shopper types in a query.
- Search weight: The searchable fields are assigned search weights (High, Normal, Low) based on their priority of affecting search results.
| Priority | Description |
|---|---|
| High | an attribute is designated as a high priority to influence the search results… |
| Medium | an attribute is designated as the second-highest priority to influence the search results |
| Low | an attribute is designated as the lowest priority of all to influence the search results |
If there are attributes that should not impact the search results, they are labelled as "Non-Searchable.”
You can edit the priority of searchable fields by following these steps:
- Navigate to Search > Search settings > Searchable fields.
- To edit the priority, select the search weight from the column against each attribute. You can choose from Non-Searchable, High, Medium, or Low.
- Click Save Settings.