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::
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
