ElasticSearch: Boosting score for content relevancy

Every search solution is build to serve relevant content to the users. Each of these search solutions provide different algorithms and mechanism for you to serve the relevant content matching your business requirements. The flexibility provided in terms of affecting and manipulating the relevancy of search results for your content allows business to serve end customers better. In this post, we will cover in details how ElasticSearch helps you to retrieve the relevant content and the ways to affect the scoring of your search data.

Content Relevance Ranking

Content relevancy is to return the relevant documents for a search query. Every business domain has its own relevancy for the content. For example, a typical eCommerce platform will have different relevancy for products based on different customers and different search criteria on different times.

You would like each product to score differently based on different criteria. Some of the typical requirements from business side for relevancy of the products,

• Relevancy based on search term, how many time a particular term occurs for a document
• Relevancy based on different content fields of the document, eg. title is more important than description for a document
• Relevancy based on combination of different field values
• Relevancy based on current conditions and field values at the query time
• Negative relevancy to some products based on certain ceriteria or field values
• Higher relevancy for new data
• Higher relevancy to products which are most liked, visited etc.