How Admins Can Boost the Relevancy of Item Properties

 

About

This tuning stage can be used to boost keywords found in document properties (metadata) by a specific factor (number).

The higher the boost number, the more weight is applied to the matching keyword.

Note: Note that you do not "boost," or overweight a keyword itself, but the metadata that keyword is categorized as.
If you "boost" the metadata type "Author" then any terms in your index classified as "Author," such as "John Smith" receive increased weight in search queries.

Tip: You can "boost" multiple web site pages.
Every page has boosting parameters.
Parameters are detailed at the bottom of this page.

Any metadata can be "boosted", including, but not limited to:

  • Author
  • Title
  • File type
  • Content type

Limitations

  • Some SmartHub Features are unsupported by some search engines.

  • For information about limitations to your search engine, see the "Limitations" topic for your search engine.

Tuning Stage Order and Properties

  • BA Insight recommends the Admin Relevancy tuning stage be added to individual search engines (search engines), and NOT at the top "General Settings" level.
    • Tuning stages added at the top, "General Settings" level affect ALL search engines
  • Admin Relevancy is added as a Query tuning stage only.
  • Admin Relevancy is NOT added as a Results tuning stage.
  • The Admin Relevancy tuning stage must be set before the Property Mapper stage. See the following topics for details.
CAUTION! The Admin Relevancy tuning stage MUST be set before the Property Mapper tuning stage.
  • The Properties specified in the "Property" field must be UI properties.

  • That is, properties which the source system properties have been mapped to.

  • For example, an Elastic search engine may have the following mappings (provided for example purposes, only):

Elastic Source System PropertyUI Property
"DocumentSummaryExtraction"Summary
"RefinableString121"Title secondary

Administrator Control

This "boosting" or over-weighting of keywords found in item properties is done using tuning stages from your SmartHub Admin page: http(s)://[web-app-url]/_admin

  • The queiries of ALL users are affected by the properties boosted in relevancy

  • Users may boost relevancy from their own SmartHub view using How End Users Can Boost the Relevancy of Item Properties.

  • Note that the relevancy of items set by users takes precedence over Admin item relevancy settings. See "Relevancy Order Set by Stage" below. 

Example: Boost "Title" Relevancy

  1. Select the search engine from the left-side navigation for which you want to boost item relevancy.

  2. Select "ADD QUERY TUNING"

  3. You want to see a list of documents with the term "Administrator" in the document Title, but your queries for "Administrator" do not seem to return what you're looking for in the first few pages of results.

  4. You want to manually boost the "rank" of the term "Administrator" found in document titles so that more documents with the term "Administrator" in the document Title, are listed higher, at the top of your search query.

  5. You apply a boost to the metadata type Title, so that any query for the term "Administrator," returns more documents with "Administrator" set in the metadata Title, at the top of your search queries. (Note that by default, Title is already weighted more than other metadata types).

  6. This tuning stage used to boost the metadata, or property, Title would look like this.

Example: Boost "Author" Relevancy

In this example, you want to manually boost the "rank" of author names, so that more documents with that term in the document's metadata type Author, are listed higher, at the top of your search query.

  • You apply a boost to the metadata type Author

    • Any documents with the term "Ph.d" categorized as metadata "Title", are given more weight and are returned at the top of your search queries.

This tuning stage used to boost the metadata, or property, Author, would look like this:

Relevancy Order Set by Stage

The order of relevancy tuning stages impacts the way documents are boosted.

User relevancy has priority over all other stages.

The default priority order is:

  1. User Relevancy
  2. Personalization
  3. Admin Relevancy

The first stage that successfully changes the search query is the only stage that is executed.

Relevancy Order Example

If an Admin Relevancy stage changes the search query, and is then followed by the stages Learn-To-Rank and Personalization, those stages are skipped.

Parameters

Name Description
pageURL

The entire URL of your page.

  • Examplehttp://contoso.microsoft.com/Results.html

Too add the item relevancy boost across multiple, or ALL of the web pages of your site:

  • Add a separate Relevancy Condition for each web page
  • Enter the web page's full URL in the "Page URL" field.
properties

The source system or UI property being boosted in relevance:

  • If the Admin Relevancy tuning stage is placed:
    • After the Property Mapper stage
      • Enter source system (Ex. Elastic) properties
    • Before the Property Mapper stage
      • Enter User Interface properties: FileType, author, etc.
Boosting Value (set using slide bar in UI)
  • Numerical range of 0 to 100.

  • Used to set properties such as "author" or "title" to a set value.

    • For example "author" could be set to 50 and "title" to 100.