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These checks will help to improve the relevance for certain pages by analyzing what’s actually indexed and removing unnecessary information or changing the index factor. After changing index factors or changing the presentation it’s necessary to fully re-index the website again because documents are not indexed alone, but in relation to the other documents. To get accurate results this is necessary.
Improvement Suggestions
Besides carefully analyzing what is indexed and tuning all the fields and indexing factors, there are many other improvements that can be implemented. The best approach is to try to improve the search results first by analyzing the fields as mentioned in the previous paragraph. But luckily there are several other improvements that are known to work well to improve the search experience. Here is a top 5:
- Divide your website in several parts, categories or other logical parts. For example if you have a forum or document database on your website then index these sources with additional metadata that can be used to create additional filters. This is explained in the ‘How-to’ chapter.
- Offer advanced search and filtering options, such as searching in site categories, document types, date ranges and sorting by date instead of relevance. Optionally create a simple search interface and an advanced search interface.
- Provide search tips to website visitors. Show example queries, preferably from the query top 10 of course. Explain how to use the advanced search options, if they are implemented.
- Remove pages or documents from the index. By removing documents the total amount of documents is lower and therefore the relevance of the remaining documents automatically increases. Usually there are groups or types of documents that may be nice to index, but are not relevant at all for the average user. This could also be a bit tricky, so be careful not to remove too many documents.
- Implement a "best bets" search. (See *** the ‘How-to’ chapter)
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