The document discusses ways to improve site search and relevance. It recommends making content easy to find for different types of users and boosting important fields like titles. It also suggests using processors like HTML filtering and highlighting search terms. Additionally, it proposes manipulating results by boosting recent or specific content types and allowing editors to specify keywords or promote content. Finally, the document stresses that relevance is an ongoing process that requires periodically reviewing searches and improving algorithms or curated results.

1. Site Search and
Relevance
Make your content easy to find

2. FOR A VARIETY OF USERS
Search Is
Important
● Users without domain
knowledge
● Task-oriented or
transactional visitors

3. Tweet Today:
If a person can not find what they need from
your site? It is as if it wasn’t there.
If a person can not find what they need from
your site? It is as if it wasn’t there.
If a person can not find what they need from
your site? It is as if it wasn’t there.
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@Blackamazon

4. Search API:
Fields

5. A Word About Field Indexing in Solr
● Fulltext: for relevance
● String or integer: for facets
Possible to index a field more than once!
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7. Boost Important Fields
● Matches in key fields weighted higher
● Usually title, perhaps also sku, others
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9. Rendered HTML Output
● Add to fields as a quick way to render all
content, especially for Fulltext inclusion
● Saves individually configuring many fields,
building in relationships to other entities, etc
● Loss of ability to tune relevance per field
○ Could use new display mode, spec
priority fields separately
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11. Referenced entities
● Taxonomy terms, users, etc
● By default will index ID values instead of
labels
○ Useful for facets, less so for relevance
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13. Search API:
Processors

14. HTML Filter
● Prevent HTML tags from being indexed
● Typically on body content or Rendered
HTML Output
● Also options to boost relevance for
specific tags such as headings
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16. Ignore characters
● Prevent punctuations and similar
characters from impeding matches
● Also transliteration of accented
characters
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18. Highlight
● Display an excerpt of results text, with matches
bolded
○ Similar to Google’s result structure
● Can display unexpected formatting, especially
when using stemming
○ Solution: highlight with an aggregated field
of all content, index as FullText Unstemmed
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20. Parse Modes
● Part of the view configuration
● Default is very fault tolerant
● Direct query allows for modifiers e.g. + or - on keywords
○ Easy to break
● Fuzziness: characters can be off per word
● Sloppiness: keywords can be apart
● As you change the parse mode, a description provided
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22. Manipulating
Results

23. Type-specific Boosting
● Available OOTB in recent versions of
Search API Solr
● Increased relevance based in bundle /
content type
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25. Boosting Recent Content
● Currently requires custom code
● https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/modules/search-a
pi-solr/search-api-solr-howtos/boosting-by-date
● https://www.hashbangcode.com/article/drupal-8-
date-search-boosting-search-api-and-solr-search
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26. “Search Keywords” Field
● Give editors the ability to manually specify
keywords to add relevance
● Boost to prioritize field, higher than body
● Typically hide in view mode
● Allows editors to add relevance but not
remove it
○ No ability to rank results
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28. Search Overrides Modules
● Allow editors to promote and remove
content for specific queries
● Option to manually rank promoted
content
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29. Additional
Concepts

30. Relevance is a Process, Not a Destination
● Periodically review popular searches
○ Have an SME evaluate the quality of results
○ Determine what improvements can be made
algorithmically vs curating results
● Abandoned searches a metric to evaluate search
result quality
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31. Context-specific Searches
● Give visitors the ability to search a subset of content
○ Potentially specialized facets and other
functionality
● Examples
○ Product search
○ FAQ knowledgebase
○ Program finder (Higher Ed)
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32. Discussion

33. Thank you.