There are three options available to improve the quality
of search results and thus the overall search experience for your
site visitors. The three options are using the Suggested Links portlet,
changing the default query operator from Or to And, and applying boost factors to specific metadata fields.
Using the Suggested Links portlet
Use the Suggested
Links portlet to ensure that a specific document is listed at the
beginning of a set of search results. When a site visitor runs a search,
the Suggested Links portlet displays the documents that are tagged
with the same keywords from the search. To edit the keywords for Suggested
Links, complete the following steps: - Log in to WebSphere® Portal as
an administrator and navigate to the Search Center.
- Select Edit keywords for Suggested Links for the document that you would like to edit.
- Specify what tags you would like to associate with that specific
document.
- Click Save.
The keywords that you specified are now associated with that
item. If a site visitor searches for any of those keywords that are
associated with that specific document, that document displays as
a link in the Suggested Links portlet. Changing the default search operator from "Or" to "And"
When a site visitor enters more than one search
term, the Portal search engine applies a logical Or operator as a default. In order for a document to display in the
search results list, the document must have only one of those search
terms. However, search engines such as Google often use And as the default search operator. Using And as the
default search operator means that all of the terms used in the search
query must be found in each of the returned documents. For more details
on changing the default search operator, see Search service
configuration parameters in the related links. Applying boost factors to specific metadata fields
When a site visitor runs a search, any values from metadata fields
such as title, description, or keywords are automatically added to the generic content field in the search index. The values in these fields
contribute equally to relevance calculation for any qualifying documents
that are returned in the search results list. Use the search service
configuration parameter boostingSettings to give
extra weight to specified metadata fields, such as title or description. You can also use boostingSettings to specify how much extra weight specified metadata fields receive.
For more information on the parameter boostingSettings, see Search service configuration parameters in the
related links.