ABOUT SEARCHING AND SEARCH PRACTICIES

Faceted search is a topic broad enough to deserve its own book. It has become a standard feature of all modern search engines, including…

Location often provides a strong signal of searcher intent. Sometimes location acts as an implicit part of the search query, such as when…

Search engines are so core to our digital experience that we take them for granted. Most of us cannot remember the web without Google to…

Queries are the primary way that searchers communicate with search engines. But it’s difficult to get started with query understanding…

In 1964, information science pioneer William Goffman said:

A key application of query rewriting is increasing recall — that is, matching a larger set of relevant results. In extreme cases…

In the previous post, we discussed query expansion as a way to increase recall. In this post we’ll discuss the other major technique for…

Thus far, we’ve focused on query understanding at the character and token level. It’s time move up the stack, on to entities and the query…

In the previous post, we discussed how query segmentation improves precision by grouping query words into semantic units. In this post…

The previous two posts focused on using query rewriting to increase recall. We can also use query rewriting to increase precision — that…

In this series, I’ve focused on the context of traditional search applications, which are the main beneficiaries of better query…

On the surface, using a voice interface for search doesn’t seem that different from typing text into a search box.

When we talk about search, we have traditionally thought in terms of search results being documents or products. Searchers, however…

The idea of modeling search as a conversation has been around for decades. One of the oldest ideas in information retrieval is relevance…

Most search applications assume a query-response paradigm: the searcher submits a search query, and the search engine responds with…

Search result snippets, also known as query-biased summaries, are the additional context included with each result on the search results…

Search queries that express broad intent often return intractably large result sets. We’ve already discussed faceted search as a way to…

Until now, we’ve mostly focused on query processing — which is to be expected, given that this series is about query understanding. But…

Whether it’s the time of year or the time of day, the time when someone performs a search sometimes help us determine the searcher’s…

The most immediate context for a search query is a search session, a sequence of activities the searcher performs in order to pursue an…

Spelling correction is a must-have for any modern search engine. Estimates of the fraction of misspelled search queries vary, but a variety…

Different forms of a word often communicate essentially the same meaning. For example, there’s probably no difference in intent between a…

In order to understand queries, it’s important to ground that understanding in a knowledge base. Two common ways to represent a knowledge…

Now that we can handle characters, let’s move on to words.

Efficient topic modelling in Python

Search + Merchandising = Searchandising. Learn what searchandising is and how it can increase sales in ecommerce stores with our practical hacks.

A sandbox of search design illustrations, including a pattern library for search and discovery.

Sease is a company specialising in information retrieval. We provide IR consulting services, training sessions for beginners and advanced professionals, and information retrieval tools and plugins.

How data splitting can be done and why it is important for the offline evaluation of Learning to Rank models?

There is one topic that gives even the toughest search engineers a headache, multi-word synonyms. There are some ways to sort of get a solution, one of them is a nice tool called Querqy. Querqy is created by René Kriegler....