Ranking

Site Search > Configurations > Basic Configurations > Ranking

The Ranking screen lets us apply “boost” multipliers to relevance scores of result items that meet special criteria.

  • Enable Smart Ranking: Enable or disable the Site Search Smart Ranking feature. Smart Ranking reorders search results to match the searcher’s intent.
  • Enable Field Ranking: Enable or disable various boost features that are configured from this screen.
    • Search Field: If there is a match within a specific field, boost the item’s relevance score.
    • Field Value: If a field contains a specific value (whether matched or not), boost the item’s relevance score.
    • Function: Boost the item’s relevance score based on a value returned by a function.

Slide the controls left and right to establish the relative importance of a match in each field. A default (unboosted) field has a boost multiplier of 1. 

Search Field

To boost an item when a match occurs within a specific field, select “Search Field” and choose the field from a list. Click the (+) button to create a slider control for that field. Use the slider to adjust the boost.

Note the Reload Schema icon above the list of fields. If you can’t find a field in the list, try reloading the schema. Changes to your website’s Solr schema are not automatically updated in Site Search.

Field Value

To create a boost based on the presence of a specific field value in the result item, select the “Field Value” option and then fill in the field name and the desired value.

Function

To calculate a partial relevance score based on the value of a field, select the Function option and type in a Solr Function Query expression. Click the (+) button to create a slider control.

No spaces!

The function syntax does not tolerate spaces. It will fail to Publish until you remove them.

Some example functions you can use are:

  1. To boost if the field ‘sitename’ contains ‘Public’: termfreq(sitename,'Public')
  2. To boost by a date field, ‘publish_date’:
    recip(ms(NOW,publish_date),3.16e-11,10,1)

Click the Save Draft button before you leave or refresh a page. Otherwise, changes can be lost. The Publish button makes this Search Profile available to the Preview screen.

Questions?

Do not hesitate to contact the SearchStax Support Desk.