Relevance overview

• To find results, Algolia uses text-based comparisons like typos and stop words, and non-textual factors such as filter criteria and geolocation.
• Ranking, which determines the order of results, relies on a tie-breaking algorithm to present the most relevant items first.

• Too many irrelevant results. Relevance suffers when searching large text attributes. Consider searching smaller, targeted attributes instead.
• Important content is buried. You haven’t implemented custom ranking or failed to set some key attributes as searchable.

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How to improve relevance

• Choose a good set of searchable attributes.
• Apply custom ranking to adapt Algolia to your needs.

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Further relevance optimizations

• Use rules to override relevance in some situations. For example, for seasonal product promotions.
• Use synonyms if your records contain terms that users may be unfamiliar with.
• Offer facets so users can fine-tune the relevance of their results.
• Change natural language settings to help anticipate user errors (such as misspellings) and to optimize for a multi-lingual audience.
• Use Personalization (classic or advanced) to show returning users results that align with their established preferences, like works by a specific author or clothing from a particular brand.

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Enhance the user experience

• Sorting
• Grouping
• Geolocation
• Prefix searching
• Multi-lingual support.

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See also

• Implementation checklist
• Empty or insufficient results
• What is search relevance? (blog)
• Search engine relevance (blog)