If you have come across a search results page where the top results are irrelevant to the search term entered the majority of the time, it's due to the incorrect setup of Relevancy ranking. Relevancy Ranking of products on Search and Browse pages is the critical search feature that easily gets ignored on several retail sites.
Most of the modern enterprise search engines provide an easier way of handling relevance using business tools. However, understanding the algorithm and the fitment behind these results is not simple. Online businesses generally have a standard retail strategy applied for relevance, but this may not be applicable for every domain. As complexity increases with data corresponding to multiple sources, locales, and applications, the Relevancy Ranking requires some fine-tuning.
Below are some of the measures that need to be factored into to improve Website Product Relevancy Ranking:-
Monitoring Search Results
Use analytics to monitor user behavior on the search and browse results. Information like most clicked products, most popular searches, error results, spell correction, and page behavior gives an indication of how relevant results are shown to the user. These data form the basis of boosting required results and ignoring irrelevant results.
Interpreting the data
As the online business grows many online retailers fail to understand the importance of data updates. With the creation of huge product-specific properties, understanding the attributes associated with the right data helps to display relevant products in the right order. Applications need to have the real-time capability to refresh this data timely and getting it to end-users in the shortest time possible.
Prioritization of Attributes
Attributes precedence is key for relevancy. There needs to be a clear definition of the data associated with these attributes. Special considerations have to be taken for data like Category Name, Product Name, Descriptions, and other keywords, as these attributes form the basis of the Search Engine Index. Custom attributes can be created as required and added to the prioritization list.
Relevancy Ranking Algorithm
Teams that are responsible for creating Product data have to be well versed with the relevancy ranking modules and their impact on the end online user. Each ranking module is executed during the relevancy ranking process and ranks the results. Teams need to ensure that at the end of every execution if there is a tie-break, appropriate results need to be segregated and ranked as per precedence.
Enterprise Search Engines
The setting of core search functionalities like Synonyms, Thesaurus, Stemming, Spell Corrections, Did you mean, Most Popular, etc play a vital role in displaying the relevant results. For sites having multiple locales custom stemming files have to be maintained. Also, it's very essential to keep building the dictionary as and when new data sets are added. Many modern search engines provide all the above features Out of the box as an administration tool.