What is a B2B marketplace?
It’s no secret that B2B (business-to-business) transactions have largely migrated online. According to Gartner, by 2025, 80 ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
It’s no secret that B2B (business-to-business) transactions have largely migrated online. According to Gartner, by 2025, 80 ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Twice a year, B2B Online brings together industry leaders to discuss the trends affecting the B2B ecommerce industry. At the ...
Director of Product Marketing & Strategy
This is Part 2 of a series that dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ...
Benoit Reulier &
Reshma Iyer
Get ready for the ride: online shopping is about to be completely upended by AI. Over the past few years ...
Director, User Experience & UI Platform
Remember life before online shopping? When you had to actually leave the house for a brick-and-mortar store to ...
Search and Discovery writer
If you imagine pushing a virtual shopping cart down the aisles of an online store, or browsing items in an ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Remember the world before the convenience of online commerce? Before the pandemic, before the proliferation of ecommerce sites, when the ...
Search and Discovery writer
Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just the stuff of scary futuristic movies; it’s recently burst into the headlines ...
Search and Discovery writer
Imagine you are the CTO of a company that has just undergone a massive decade long digital transformation. You’ve ...
CTO @Algolia
Did you know that the tiny search bar at the top of many ecommerce sites can offer an outsized return ...
Director, Digital Marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly moved from hot topic to everyday life. Now, ecommerce businesses are beginning to clearly see ...
VP of Product
We couldn’t be more excited to announce the availability of our breakthrough product, Algolia NeuralSearch. The world has stepped ...
Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Algolia
The ecommerce industry has experienced steady and reliable growth over the last 20 years (albeit interrupted briefly by a global ...
CTO @Algolia
As an ecommerce professional, you know the importance of providing a five-star search experience on your site or in ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Hashing. Yep, you read that right. Not hashtags. Not golden, crisp-on-the-outside, melty-on-the-inside hash browns ...
Search and Discovery writer
We’re just back from ECIR23, the leading European conference around Information Retrieval systems, which ran its 45th edition in ...
Senior ML Engineer
Your grandfather wears those comfy slipper-y shoes all day, every day, and they’re starting to get holes in ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Every time I look at the news, there is another article about the race to build new search and discovery ...
Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia
Sep 12th 2017 product
Today, we are releasing Query Rules, a new feature which enables you to modify, override, & enhance the behavior of the engine’s configured ranking for a subset of the queries. We wanted to share with you how we approached this key addition to our API, why we decided to build it, and explain the design steps leading to the release today.
Before we dive in, let’s look at a few examples of what you can do with Query Rules:
With Algolia, the same relevance algorithm is applied across the entire index. We expose features like Custom Ranking so that customers can customize the ranking strategy for their needs, and achieve a great relevance for the vast majority of queries. However, in the past few years, our customers started to bring to us examples of outlier queries.
We began compiling a list of these outlier situations. Here are a few examples:
There are hundreds of examples like this where having an exception to the general rule would make sense, either to improve the relevance, or to override the ranking for business reasons.
There are two main ways to address the types of exceptions we were seeing. The natural way to handle this would be to analyze the use cases one by one and add a configuration to the engine to handle each of them individually. We could, for example, develop a form of synonyms that would transform a word into a filter. Eventually, these settings would form a merchandising tool, allowing users to tweak and override the ranking logic.
We certainly had the experience on the team to execute on this approach. Several team members, including our founders, have used, or even built merchandising platforms prior to founding/working for Algolia. However, it is exactly because of this experience that we had doubts that this was the right approach:
More importantly, we wanted to do more than merchandising and address the needs of other industries. Media sites don’t use merchandising, but they still want to promote, for example, partner content. SaaS systems may want to improve the ranking by adding rules automatically based on the output of a machine learning tool.
To do this, we would need to be able to impact search results on a subset of queries in two distinct places:
What we came up with is a rules system for queries — or Query Rules — that sits inside the engine via two modules:
Each rule has the following pattern: IF the query contains X, THEN modify Y. A condition and a consequence:
This approach makes it simple to modify the behavior of a subset of the queries, without impacting the rest of the queries. We created two types of conditions, and seven types of consequences, which together allow us to handle a variety of exceptions, including:
With Query Rules, we’re bringing to Algolia the ability to handle queries on an individual basis by making exceptions on the regular ranking strategy.
We think the approach we took has a few interesting benefits:
In fact, we like to think of Query Rules as more than a feature: we like to think of it as an extension of our engine. We have designed it to be open-ended enough to allow our users to solve their own unique problems and push the boundaries of what is possible with search.
It’s been exciting to start sharing the feature with a few beta testers — we’ve been amazed at how easily they grasped its potential, and the combinations it allows.
The two conditions and seven consequences we are initially releasing are only the beginning — we look forward to getting your feedback and learning which ones you’d like us to add next!
Meanwhile, we put together an online workshop, where two of our team members will show you in practice how to create smarter search with Query Rules.
=> You can register here.
How to apply business logic for more relevant search results.
Powered by Algolia Recommend