Search Results Not Pulling Best Match

  • Resolved Kriis

    (@kriis)


    6 years, 9 months ago

    I have noticed that several searches on my site are not pulling the best match when there is an exact title match available.

    For instance, I have a page titled Less Is More (I removed Less and More from the exclusion words):
    https://recipesnow.com/recipes/herbs-spices/less-is-more/

    but the search returns two completely unrelated titles and doesn’t include the direct title match:
    https://recipesnow.com/?s=Less+Is+More

    Also, I have found that often a near match will appear in the top spot even when there is an exact match available. This search is for “Fix-It and Forget-It Diabetic Cookbook” but that article shows a #2 in the list behind the Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook.
    https://recipesnow.com/?s=Fix-It+and+Forget-It+Diabetic+Cookbook

    I am using AND for the searches and have set the title to 8, content is 1 and Comments are 0.75. How can I increase the accuracy of my results?

    P.S. I tried setting the title to 9 but got even worse results.

    EDIT:

    After typing this I realized that I didn’t reindex after removing “Less” and “More” from the stopwords list. I reindexed and that seems to have solved the problem for that search. The problem with similar searches being given priority over exact matches however remains.

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Kriis.
Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Mikko Saari

    (@msaari)

    Relevanssi doesn’t give exact title matches any extra boost (though that’s going to change in the next version, so many people ask for it that I’m likely adding some sort of boost for exact phrase matches), and may quite easily value a post with an exact title match lower than other posts, if those other posts feature the keywords more prominently.

    In your second example, while the Diabetic Cookbook is clearly the best result for the word “diabetic” alone, it’s a weaker result for the other words. Relevanssi has no way of knowing “diabetic” is the most important word here.

    Increasing the title weight might actually work, but changing it from 8 to 9 is probably not doing much. I’d try changing from 8 to 80.

    Here’s how you can give a boost for exact title matches: https://www.relevanssi.com/knowledge-base/adding-extra-boost-exact-title-matches/

    Thread Starter Kriis

    (@kriis)

    For some reason, I thought the order of words in a search dictated the priority, my bad.

    I tried adding the exact title code to my theme functions page but got the same results so will simply await the update.

    Even with the issues that I mentioned I have to say it has made searching on my site so much easier. Thanks!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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