August 2018
Beginner
414 pages
3h 16m
English
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Chapter #91. Search Results Pages Should Show the Most Relevant Result at the Top of the Page
Of all the principles in this guide, this might be the number one no-brainer. Of course, show the user the most relevant results first. Yet, time and again, this principle is broken and users are shown irrelevant items first in their results.
So, why have you asked the user to search, then shown them a poor set of results?
Reason 1: your search algorithm sucks.
Technically, this is the toughest one to solve. Ranking search results is, in some cases, a tricky technical problem, but there are tried and tested technologies (TF-IDF is a very popular algorithm for ranking text documents: see term frequency-inverse document frequency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf)) ...