On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Mark Bennett <mbenn...@ideaeng.com> wrote:
> Hi Grant, > > You're welcome to use any of my slides (Dave's got them), with attribution > of course. > > BUT.... > > Have you considered a section something like "why the hell do you think > Relevancy tweaking is gonna save you!?!?" > Basically that, as a corpus grows exponentially, so do results list sizes, > so ALL relevancy tweaks will eventually fail. And FACETS (or other > navigators) are the answer. I've got slides on that as well. > The idea is to get the relevancy to fail on a smaller and smaller percent of the queries, as the corpus grows larger. Facets can definitely help, but they don't solve the basic problem of search, when there is no facet for the particular way the user is looking for something. The strength of search is that it can help the user to find things even when other forms of navigation fail. Of course relevancy matters.... but it's only ONE of perhaps a three pronged > approach: > 1: Organic Relevancy and top query suggetions > 2: Results list Navigators, the best the system can support, and > 3: Data quality (spidering, METADATA quality, source weighting, etc) > I would prefer to say that data quality can directly contribute to relevance (besides being important for other reasons as well). Basically, search relevancy is a combination of quality of data + quality of algorithm. In general, they are both important, and data even has the potential to be more important than algorithm, if you structure it right. Also, tuning the algorithms to the users can be very important. For instance, we have found that in a basic search functionality, the default query parser operator OR works very well. But on a page for advanced users, who want to very precisely tune their search results, a default of AND works better. Regards, -- Avi
