What is Tuning?

To tune your new Hawksearch engine, you should start by testing your site’s most popular site search keywords.

Using the Hawksearch preview, you can look for patterns of what is matching and what is not matching. Start by reviewing the results for the 20-30 most popular site search keywords. The goal is to make global adjustments that impact all searches. When necessary, you can apply adjustments that are specific to a keyword, or a group of keywords.

The tools below will assist you in making adjustments to your Hawksearch engine to improve the relevancy. Reminder: Many adjustments in the Workbench do require a full rebuild of the index before they can be tested.

Testing the results before switching to your new Hawksearch is strongly recommended. It is also recommended to review the results of the top keywords on a regular basis, as well as keywords that users are searching with that produce no results. This can be done in the Hawksearch reports section, using the following reports.

Top 250 Search Keywords
Searches with Poor Results

Using the Tools

The Hawksearch Preview

The Hawksearch preview is a valuable tool that is used to see why results receive the relevancy score that they do. Using the preview, you can see which fields are matching on an item and the other factors that contribute to the final relevancy score. Watch the following video for more.

Basic Field Settings

There are field settings that will impact the search results and the relevancy score. The most common ones used are the query flag, the field boost and the partial query type. Watch the following video to learn about these settings.

Advanced Field Settings

Query Iterations: If needed, multiple iterations of searching can be done. The search engine will initially query all fields that are marked for the first iteration. If there are no results found, the engine will query the fields marked for the second iteration (if any). For example, if the title field and brand field could be marked for the first iteration and a description field and the title field could be marked for the second iteration. There can be up to 3 iterations of searching. Each field that is flagged to be queried will also have a value indicating which search iteration(s) the field should be considered for.
Analyzer: By default, the Hawk Analyzer is applied to a field that is queried. This is the Hawksearch version of the Snowball Analyzer. The Hawk Analyzer is the only one that will apply synonyms. If you have the need for a different analyzer on a field. You can read about them here: Analyzers
OmitTermFreq: The number of times a keyword is found in a field influences the relevancy score. If there is the need to not count occurrences of the keyword in a field, this setting can be used to turn off the term frequency factor.
OmitNorms: Norms allow for field length normalization to help influence relevance. For example, if a document has 50,000 lines of text and another has 50 lines of text, the smaller document would score higher. Turning "OmitNorm” to “on” will disable this option for this field. Enable this feature for fields where the length of the value should not be taken into account. An example of this is a field that has keyword tags in it, or sometimes a name/title field when there are additional values stored in the name field for display.

Boost/Bury Rules

Boost and Bury Rules are a tool that can be used to influence the Hawksearch relevancy score. The following video walks through an example of a conditional rule and a global rule.

Pinning

Pinning is used to place specific items at the top of the search results for specific keywords. Watch the following video to see how.

Synonyms

Synonyms are used to expand search results when there are keywords that are different, but similar enough that the results should be shared. Synonyms should not be used to correct misspellings, unless the misspellings occur in the data. If there are spelling corrections that are not handled by Hawksearch’s Autocorrect, they should be addressed with a Spelling Override or a Keyword Replacement.

Keyword Replacements

Keyword replacements are used to change the search that was entered by the user. Watch the video below to see an example.

Visibility Rules

Visibility Rules are used to hide results. These rules can be global or conditional. Common global rules include items that are out-of-stock, or are not sellable online for some reason. Watch the following video to see a conditional visibility rule being set up.

Next Steps

After making adjustments to the engine to improve the relevancy, please use the attached spreadsheet to document search terms that still need adjusting and that need assistance from Hawksearch. Then, please send this spreadsheet to your Hawksearch Project Manager.

Download here: Hawksearch-TuningAssistance.xlsx