10. Search Relevance Dahsboard

The Discovery Search Relevance Scoring dashboard is a tool that provides search engine diagnostic capabilities complementary to the rest of the platform.

One of the goals of a search application is to deliver results that are as relevant as possible to queries submitted by users. And while search relevancy tuning requires significant expertise and a good methodology, the process starts with being able to objectively measure the quality or “score” of a search engine at any given time.

An analogy to this in medicine is the EKG or ECG (electrocardiogram). This diagnostic tool measures certain mechanical aspects of how the heart is performing and results are compared to an expected “norm.” Often the EKG is the first step in diagnosing a major issue that might lead to major heart surgery. But no surgeon would even consider such drastic measures without first doing an EKG.

The Discovery Search Relevance Dashboard measures the “health” of search application results. It can objectively determine when new software modifications or content changes or changing user behavior over time leads to a deterioration in the quality of search results.

The Discovery Search Relevance Dashboard leverages user activity log files to analyze submitted queries and how far down the presented results users have to scroll to click on an answer, link or document they deemed most relevant. But engine scoring is a diagnostic and not a prescriptive tool. If the score is low, search engineers still have to determine the problem and introduce changes or software fixes. Regular or continuous monitoring does, however, provide an indication of whether or not the fixes have improved (or degraded) results.

More detailed information is available on how search relevance scoring works, and how it is used for relevancy tuning and continuous improvements of search results.