Customer feedback and usability testing has told us that
our nifty, innovative advanced search features are somewhat hard to
discover. For those of you who haven’t
tried it, or wondered how it worked, here’s the scoop.
By clicking “+Search Builder” beneath the text box, you
drop down a panel with a set of advanced search features like site specific
search, country and language restrictions, and lots more. As you add constraints in Search Builder to
your search, the syntax automatically appears in the query box. Selecting
“Results Ranking” exposes the sliders which allow you to tweak the ranking
function. Adjusting the slider adds a parameter to the query string like
“{popl=85}” (for the picture below).
So what happens to the results when you bump up
popularity? More weight is put on query
independent qualities and less on query related attributes.
The picture below is a visualization of a search with and
without the {popl} attribute. In the visualization, the squares represent
results. For each result::
- result position is on the x-axis
- color &
size represent the query dependent rank (green is good, red is less good)
- the y-axis
(height) represents query independent
rank
An example URL is highlighted in both result sets. The TabletPCBuzz.com site appears at position# 6 in the normal query but position #2 in the {popl} version. Due to its
popularity, it is moved up 4 slots when the popularity slider
is raised.
The Search Builder is just a second way from any search
you’re doing!
Andy Edmonds, Relevance Measurement PM
