Using Query Settings to Fine-Tune Search Results

Owned by Cooper Labenske
Apr 06, 2022
3 min read

When it searches through data, Voyager assigns a relative relevancy value to each item. It calculates relevancy using an initial text-based query, but it also provides settings that you can use to promote different categories of data within the results. These can help you refine your searches so that they return the most relevant results for your particular needs.

See How Voyager Calculates Relevancy of Search Results for more information.

Configuring Query Settings

To configure query settings, go to Manage Voyager > Index > Query Settings.

 

You can adjust the following settings:

Query fields

Use this setting to set the relative weight of matches in specific fields during a search. To enter a weight to a field, add a ^ symbol followed by a number, for example title^7 or name^5.  In this example, matches in the title field would be relatively more important than matches in the name field, which in turn would be more important than matches in the text field.   

 

NOTES

  • You cannot assign a zero weight or a negative weight.  

  • You can, however, assign fractional weights such as 1.115 or 300.999

  • The default weight for each field is 1

Default Sort

Use this option to sort search results based on fields you select. For example, you might sort items from one database server over those from another server.

 

Append Parameters

Append Parameters allows you to include Solr query parameters to a request by default.  Often, this is used to assign a boost value to specific items.

For example:

  • If a query returns two documents with equal relevancy, you can boost the one that has metadata to the top

  • If a file appears in two different places - use boost values to return the copy from a reliable file server over the copy from a less reliable location. 

  • If only some documents have thumbnails, you can boost them using the syntax bq=hasThumb:true (bq indicates that this is a boost query).

 

There are many other factors that determine relevance, so it may be necessary to adjust parameters and re-test in order to get the desired results. It may also be helpful to adjust the Query Fields settings.

Calculate Bounding Box

Select this to show the bounding box for all results with a blue box on the Overview Map.  This can become time-consuming if you are working with a very large index (5 Million records or more). 

 

Finding Important Records

You can raise the Relevancy of important search results by Boosting them based on field attributes.  For more information, see: