Posts by Melody Smith

This is the next piece in our series of blog posts on search and how it works This time we are talking about the importance of relevancy. Relevance is how well a set of returned documents answers the information need, another way of talking about accuracy. But, it’s related to the objective of the search so different user communities can get exactly the same answer from a set of information resources and one will find the set relevant and the other will not. So, there’s a really healthy tension between the user needs and the context available. That’s why a lot of relevance engines do a lot of profiling of the users so that, if I search Google for a particular question, I might get one answer and each of you will search it and get a different answer. That’s because your profile and the things that you’ve clicked on in the past will indicate to Google that your answers should be more in this sphere or more in that sphere. So, relevance is really a confidence factor or a guesstimate on how well this set of documents will answer this particular user’s query.