Chapter 9. Designing a relevance-focused search application

 

This chapter covers

  • Gathering information before building a new search application
  • Designing and implementing a complete search application
  • Designing a query as a composite of subqueries
  • Balancing query parameters
  • Deploying, monitoring, and improving search
  • Knowing when further relevance tuning is no longer advantageous

In the previous chapters, we laid out all the ingredients for good search:

  • Extracting features from the text of the documents through proper tokenization
  • Defining important signals and creating search fields to represent them
  • Crafting queries that take into account both user needs and business requirements
  • Providing feedback to users in order to guide them to more-relevant results

Now, this chapter is the rest of the recipe—the set of instructions that organizes these ingredients and lays out the methodology for building a relevance-focused search application.

9.1. Yowl! The awesome new start-up!

9.2. Gathering information and requirements

9.3. Designing the search application

9.4. Deploying, monitoring, and improving

9.5. Knowing when good is good enough

9.6. Summary