Chapter 7. Shaping the relevance function

This chapter covers

  • Bringing up relevant content through boosting
  • Knowing when to use different forms of boosting
  • Improving the ranking of popular or recent content
  • Filtering out irrelevant or noisy content from search results
  • Stoking your own creative uses of the search engine’s querying features

As a relevance engineer, you tailor your users’ search experience to their many unspoken ranking expectations. Unpacking, understanding, and finally implementing these expectations are key parts of your job. For example, almost everyone has a sense that a news search should show up-to-date articles about breaking events. Or that a restaurant search shouldn’t take into account only the user’s query but ...

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