This document discusses search interfaces and principles. It begins by introducing Daniel Beach and his work in search. It then covers general search principles like using search as a conversation with users and focusing on relevance over design. Various search techniques are explained, including indexing, query analysis, result scoring, filtering, aggregations, autocomplete, highlighting and loading more results. The document emphasizes that search provides flexibility to return relevant content given user inputs.
13. Search is an opportunity
to have a conversation.
‣ Users are telling you what
they expect to find on your
site
‣ Search is an opportunity to
learn about your users /
customers
20. Accommodate Multiple
Types of Searching
‣ Informational users are
interested in the breadth of
your data
‣ Navigational users want to
get somewhere fast
28. Query Analysis
A compatible analysis chain must be used for the query string as the indexed content in
order for terms to match.
29. TERM MEANING
Tokenization
Splitting text into indexable pieces, called tokens.A word is often an
example of a token.
Stemming
Collapsing words to their root (interpretation, interpreting -->
interpret)
Inverted index An index of tokens. Maps tokens to document position
Term frequency The number of times a token occurs in a document
Inverse document
frequency
Tokens that appear in fewer documents are calculated to be more
important (simplified)
30. Document Scoring
‣ Score based on number of
matches in a document, as
compared to the popularity of
that term across all
documents.
31. Types of Boosts
‣ Field boosts
‣ Text matching (title^5
description)
‣ Function scores
‣ Boost newer content
‣ Multiply by % of popularity
‣ …
32. Minimum Match
‣ How many of the query terms
have to match in order for a
document to be returned?
‣ Precision vs recall
36. Response
{
"took": 47,
"timed_out": false,
"hits": {
"total": 2,
"max_score": 2.17284,
"hits": [
{
"_index": "catalog",
"_type": "comics",
"_id": "84",
"_score": 2.17284,
"_source": {
"title": "Descender",
"description": "One young robot’s struggle to stay alive
in a universe where all androids have been outlawed and bounty
hunters lurk on every planet."
...
55. Think outside the
search box
‣ Search gives you extreme
flexibility to return relevant
content quickly, given a wide
range of inputs
‣ Retrieval and ranking engine
