Ranking

The Ranking screen lets us apply “boost” multipliers to relevance scores of result items that meet special criteria. View our Ranking video for a brief demonstration.

Ranking is a Profile-level feature.

Ranking configuration panel with Enable Smart Ranking and Enable Field Ranking toggle options highlighted.

Smart Ranking

Enable Smart Ranking: Enable or disable the Site Search Smart Ranking feature. Smart Ranking reorders search results to match the searcher’s intent.

Field Ranking

Enable Field Ranking: Enable or disable various boost features that are configured from this screen.

  • Search Field: If there is a match within a specific field, boost the item’s relevance score.
  • Field Value: If a field contains a specific value (whether matched or not), boost the item’s relevance score.
  • Function: Boost the item’s relevance score based on a value returned by a function.
The Ranking Options panel showing search field configuration with _nest_path_ selected, a dropdown menu listing Search Field, Field Value, and Function ...

Slide the controls left and right to establish the relative importance of a match in each field. A default (unboosted) field has a boost multiplier of 1. 

Search Field

To boost an item when a match occurs within a specific field, select “Search Field” and choose the field from a list. Click the (+) button to create a slider control for that field. Use the slider to adjust the boost.

Ranking options panel with Search Field dropdown and author_ss field selected, plus button to add slider control.

Note the Reload Schema icon above the list of fields. If you can’t find a field in the list, try reloading the schema. Changes to your website’s Solr schema are not automatically updated in Site Search.

The Ranking Options interface with Search Field dropdown and author_ss field selected, showing the Reload Schema button.

Field Value

To create a boost based on the presence of a specific field value in the result item, select the “Field Value” option and then fill in the field name and the desired value.

Ranking options panel with Field Value dropdown, content_type search field, and PDF value selected.

Function

Location-Based Search

The Location feature can place a distance_boost() item in this list.

To calculate a partial relevance score based on the value of a field, select the Function option and type in a Solr Function Query expression. Click the (+) button to create a slider control.

Ranking Options panel with Function dropdown set to

No Spaces!

The function syntax does not tolerate spaces. It will fail to Publish until you remove them.

Some example functions you can use are:

  1. To boost if the field ‘sitename’ contains ‘Public’: termfreq(sitename,'Public')
  2. To boost by a date field, ‘publish_date’:
    recip(ms(NOW,publish_date),3.16e-11,10,1)

Click the Save Draft button before you leave or refresh a page. Otherwise, changes can be lost. The Publish button makes this Search Profile available to the Preview screen.

When you save a draft, Site Search shows a blue dot in the navigation menu to indicate pending changes for the current app, language, and search profile. The configuration page also shows a banner. Status banners show pending draft, saved draft, and published states.

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