Search relevance stopped working?

Hi,

I think your site was under migration, as we upgraded to new infrastructure. I can see the results for “puma td4 hose early” as you mentioned. Please let me know if I misunderstood.

I would be happy to assist you. Let me know if you have any questions.

Saurabh

Hi. I think it’s more a case that it’s recently already migrated to the new infrastructure and is now not ordering properly. I have had to change it to ‘All Term Match’ to get it to bring back relevant results but this isn’t perfect because I really need broad search. It’s omitting other results that should be showing on a broad search.

I’m not sure if you can search via the searchiq.co interface (so completely outside WordPress) for the https://www.allisport.com account but you’ll see that even here if you search for ‘puma td4 hose early’ in ‘All term search’ it brings back 2x results. If you then do the same search on ‘Broad Search’, only 1 of these products shows at the top… the other down at the bottom of the list.

It seems that maybe the product the publish date is having an affect on the listing order? The one at the top is a newer product. Please could you get back to me asap. Thanks.

Hi, so basically in the broad match algorithm, 70% of the query term has to match, while in all term match it is 100%, which means all the query term has to match. Yes, we do take care of recency in the search algorithm. I think that’s what the experience should be, one would like to have the recently published documents to give more weight than the older one.

So in your case when we switch back to broad match it increases the results and as we consider recency factor into consideration which pushes other docs on the top.

I see your point even though the number of terms matching in the title is a lot which makes it more relevant than recent documents. So the relevant document is been pushed below the recent ones. May be I can tune the weights on recency factor so that doesn’t push the recent ones with a higher boost.

I have created a ticket in our system, one of our engineers will have a look to tune the weights for recency.

Thanks,
Saurabh

Hi. Thanks for your response and I really hope that the recency weights can be tweaked. I agree that recency should be taken into account for results that match words from a title, but if, as in this case, there are 3 search words that match the title of 2 posts, there shouldn’t be posts with only 2 of those words appear above the ones with 3…. especially if the title weight is pushed right to 10 in the searchiq dashboard.

Also – you mention that recent published documents should have more weight… This makes sense for a blog, but in our case, the search is used for products which should just purely be found based on the closest match to what is typed… not how new the products are. It would be ideal to have a setting or action in functions.php to disable recency weighting.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Yes, I got your point. As tuning the weights depends on user’s site how they want it based on the content type. We will provide a recency weight slider in ranking to solve this. So, it should be out in the next sprint. I will let you know as soon as we release it.

Saurabh

That would be perfect. If you could let me know, that would be much appreciated. Thanks!

We just released a backend update, Please login to your account and under Documents > Result Ranking you will find an option to slide the recency weights to 0. That will solve the problem for you.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Saurabh

That’s brilliant. At first look, it seems to have fixed the issue. We will let you know if we spot anything else as we use it more. Thank you for your help!