improve search relevancy, not give random results

[ishinobu_actual]

I have a content extensive site, which over 3,300 pages. Ajax is giving irrelevant results. I’d like Ajax to do better in relevancy.

How to NOT show a result for a single mention of the search term in page content?

A single mention in content ranks higher than a heading style mention – which suggests that Ajax search does not read html for relevancy prominance. That’s wrong. How to fix that?

A blank search should give null results. Instead, I get pages and pages of results. How to fix that?

You don’t define your terms in documenation. What does “terms” mean in https://documentation.ajaxsearchpro.com/relevance-options?

What does “random matches” mean?

Thank you for your assistance.

I can set you up with access to the staging site but need your email address to do so.

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi,

The best way to boost the relevancy is by switching to the index table engine and enabling it. That creates a custom database with occurence counts. That alone makes a huge difference.

How to NOT show a result for a single mention of the search term in page content?

That is not possible, as it’s still considered a match. You can however make the search keyword logic more strict to only allow full keyword matches. I suggest starting with only a primary logic “AND with exact keyword matches” and no secondary logic. If the results are too strict, then switchin to the “AND” as secondary logic will allow a bit more “lighter” matches after the exact keyword matches.

You don’t define your terms in documenation. What does “terms” mean in https://documentation.ajaxsearchpro.com/relevance-options?
In that case it means taxonomy terms – categories, tags and other taxonomy term matches.

[ishinobu_actual]

Hi Ernest:

Thank you for you answers. I had read Ajax documentation. I am using index table engine search. I am familiar with Ajax’s keyword logic system. AND, the default, is most appropriate. Results relevancy in search results is not quite what it should be using Ajax (nor WP search either). I can only suppose that is the best you can do.

You did not answer my question regarding a blank search giving spurious results rather than null results. Perhaps you will fix this anomaly in a future release.

Best regards,
Ishi Nobu

[Ernest Marcinko]

Sorry, I forgot about that. You can change the minimum characters to enter to trigger from 0 to 1 or more here: https://i.imgur.com/OmEeIJ6.png

You should still try to fiddle a bit with the logic and the relevance values. I see a lot of lengthy content with many many words, so I would rather suggest trying the “AND with exact keyword matches” logic – there is a very high chance with that many words for matches. Additionally setting the secondary keyword logic to “AND” is a good practice just in case.

As for the relevance values if the titles are important, then in your case it might be beneficial to increase the title relevance by a lot. See with that many potential matches within the content it is possible that items with lot of partial occurences may get a higher relevance (just because of the high number of occurences). To balace that, you can increase the title relevance to something large like 300, and simultaniously reduce the content and excerpt relevances to 1: https://i.imgur.com/cuoky2R.png
That should make a significant change in the results order.

[Author]

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