Friday, June 27, 2014

S15E07: Query Rules – Get things in order

Want the book? Go get it!

This is the seventh episode in the series “SharePoint Search Queries Explained - The Series”. See the intro post for links to all episodes.

In the “Rewrite and paraphrase” post I discussed the concepts of recall and precision which has to do with bringing back relevant items for a search query. When you have your golden set of items, the next step is to sort them in the best order possible to ensure the most relevant items are in your top hits or first page of results.

Tip: Increase the default number of items to display to 25 or 50. Ten items is not a lot and people are getting more and more used to scrolling these days.

There are four ways to sort a result in SharePoint:
  1. Sort the results based on a ranking profile
    • You may also influence ranking by using the XRANK keyword (dynamic ordering)
  2. Sort the results based on a managed property ascending or descending
  3. Sort the results based on a sorting formula
  4. Sort the results randomly
    • This is accommodated using a special sorting formula

Monday, June 16, 2014

SharePoint Saturday Oslo–In Review

It’s now been a little over two weeks since the second SharePoint Saturday Oslo was held May 31st, 2014. And I have to say it was a blast! Everyone I talked to said they had a good time and that they enjoyed the event. I also want to thank the sponsors for making this possible, in particular K2, Metalogix and Steria. Couldn’t have done it without you!

image

 

Friday, June 13, 2014

S15E06: Query Rules–Rewrite and paraphrase

Want the book? Go get it!

This is episode six in the series “SharePoint Search Queries Explained - The Series”. See the intro post for links to all episodes.

image

Two key concepts in search are recall and  precision. Recall refers to the number of results a search engine returns for a specific query, and precision refers
 
to how precisely the results match the search user’s intent. You must make a compromise between recall and precision. If recall is too large, you essentially flood the result set with noise, and precision suffers. On the other hand, when recall is too small, you run the risk of missing useful results, so the item(s) the user is looking for may not appear in the result set; again, precision suffers.

And this is where Query Rules play a part in SharePoint. By looking at the queries coming in, you have the option to change them to better match your content, and thus improve on recall and precision.