On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 8:35 AM, Hardy, Elaine <[email protected]> wrote: > Kathy, > > While the relevance display is much improved in 2.x, it would be good to > have greater relevance given, in a keyword search, to title (specifically > the 245)and then subject fields. I also see where having a popularity > ranking might be beneficial. > > I just had to explain to a board member of one of our libraries why his > search for John Sandford turned up children's titles first. So having MARC > field 100s ranked higher than 700 in author searches would be beneficial > as well. >
To be clear, weighting hits that come from different index definitions has always been possible. 2.2 will have a staff client interface to make it easier, but the capability has been there all along. Weighting different parts of one indexed term -- say, weighting the title embedded in the keyword blob higher than the subjects embedded in the same blob -- would require the above-mentioned "make use of tsearch class weighting". But one can approximate that today by duplicating the index definitions from, say, title, author and subject classes within the keyword class. -- Mike Rylander | Director of Research and Development | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) | email: [email protected] | web: http://www.esilibrary.com > I can't comment on any of the coding possibilities other than to say which > every way doesn't negatively impact search return time is preferable. > > Elaine > > > J. Elaine Hardy > PINES Bibliographic Projects and Metadata Manager > Georgia Public Library Service, > A Unit of the University System of Georgia > 1800 Century Place, Suite 150 > Atlanta, Ga. 30345-4304 > 404.235-7128 > 404.235-7201, fax > > [email protected] > www.georgialibraries.org > http://www.georgialibraries.org/pines/ > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > Kathy Lussier > Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2012 4:43 PM > To: 'Evergreen Discussion Group' > Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Improving relevance ranking in Evergreen > > Hi all, > > I mentioned this during an e-mail discussion on the list last month, but I > just wanted to hear from others in the Evergreen community about whether > there is a desire to improve the relevance ranking for search results in > Evergreen. Currently, we can tweak relevancy in the opensrf.xml, and it > can look at things like the document length, word proximity, and unique > word count. We've found that we had to remove the modifiers for document > length and unique word count to prevent a problem where brief bib records > were ranked way too high in our search results. > > In our local discussions, we've thought the following enhancements could > improve the ranking of search results: > > * Giving greater weight to a record if the search terms appear in the > title or subject (ideally, we would like these field to be configurable.) > This is something that is tweakable in search.relevance_ranking, but my > understanding is that the use of these tweaks results in a major reduction > in search performance. > > * Using some type of popularity metric to boost relevancy for popular > titles. I'm not sure what this metric should be (number of copies attached > to record? Total circs in last x months? Total current circs?), but we > believe some type of popularity measure would be particularly helpful in a > public library where searches will often be for titles that are popular. > For example, a search for "twilight" will most likely be for the Stephanie > Meyers novel and not this > http://books.google.com/books/about/Twilight.html?id=zEhkpXCyGzIC. Mike > Rylander had indicated in a previous e-mail > (http://markmail.org/message/h6u5r3sy4nr36wsl) that we might be able to > handle this through an overnight cron job without a negative impact on > search speeds. > > Do others think these two enhancements would improve the search results in > Evergreen? Do you think there are other things we could do to improve > relevancy? My main concern would be that any changes might slow down > search speeds, and I would want to make sure that we could do something to > retrieve better search results without a slowdown. > > Also, I was wondering if this type of project might be a good candidate > for a Google Summer of Code project. > > I look forward to hearing your feedback! > > Kathy > > ------------------------------------------------------------- > Kathy Lussier > Project Coordinator > Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative > (508) 756-0172 > (508) 755-3721 (fax) > [email protected] > IM: kmlussier (AOL & Yahoo) > Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier > > > >
