Explained: Instant Search Ranking Rules
Relevance is a term that indicates how accurate and effective search results are. If the search results usually match well with what people are looking for, they are relevant. If not, they are less relevant.
With Instant Search, you can adjust the relevance of search results. You do this primarily with ranking rules.
Managing ranking rules
Each source has a list of ranking rules that are stored with the index settings. For each search query, Instant Search uses a sorting order to rank documents. The first ranking rule is applied to all documents, while each subsequent rule is applied only to documents that are considered equal according to the previous rule (i.e., as a tiebreaker).
The order of ranking rules matters. The first rule has the most impact, and the last rule has the least. Our default configuration meets most standard needs. You can change the order in the settings.
Instant Search has six built-in ranking rules:
- Words: Results are sorted based on the number of matching search terms. Documents containing all search terms come first.
- Typo: Results are sorted based on the number of typos. Documents with fewer typos come first.
- Proximity: Results are sorted based on the distance between the search terms. Documents where the search terms are close together come first.
- Attribute: Results are sorted based on the importance of the attributes. Documents with more important attributes come first.
- Sorting: Results are sorted based on the parameters associated with the search query. If sorting is more important, the results will be less relevant but will better follow the user-selected order.
- Exactness: Results are sorted based on the match between the search words and the documents. Documents with exactly the same terms come first.
You can also create your own ranking rule to further tailor the results.