PicoSearch FAQ: Influencing the search

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PicoSearch will retrieve the best documents for a query by considering the quantity, rarity, and density of the search terms in your documents. Now, a search engine is supposed to be unbiased and thorough in pointing a user to all the documents for certain words, but what if you want to steer the user to certain pages? This could be important for example, if you have pages for a special sales promotion that you want visitors to see first, or a central FAQ, or a top page for everyone who types a common word. In these and other situations you will want to adjust PicoSearch's document relevancy response, otherwise known as the ranking order.

You can influence PicoSearch's document fetching decisions by any of the following methods:

Search by default in ALL or EXACT PHRASE. The default search is for ANY words, which means the user can search for one or more words most easily. If you want multiple words to be found more often all together, then you might want to preset the search to start in FIND ALL words or FIND EXACT phrase mode instead of FIND ANY, and this will affect the ranking a lot. See the Initializing FAQ.

Set deliberate Promote and Demote options. Once a document appears in the search results, you can force it immediately to the top or bottom of the results page by Promotion and Demotion. This technique is powerful and should be reserved for most important documents and directories; if you over-use it, you may lose track of which documents were to be prioritized over others. You can promote and demote by patterned entries in your account manager, or by tags that can specify trigger words within the HTML of specific files. For details, see this FAQ: How can I keep certain URLs on top in the Search Results (using promote and demote).

Constrain the searches by Partitions or entry formats. Partitions allow you to search only subsections of your site, so you can steer a user to the right area for the topic of their searches before the searches even start. See the Partitions FAQ. Or you can set up your searches in database-like formats, where only certain key-word combinations can be chosen from. This is an advanced trick but very powerful; see this FAQ on Multiple Input queries.

Visibly add search terms to the body text. Just make sure the words you want are found abundantly, especially near the top of a document, and PicoSearch will rate that document highly for them.

Try setting User Synonyms and Spelling Variants. Professional and Premium accounts get additional language features in the "Set Synonyms & Spelling" section in the account manager. British/American spelling variants will bring in pages with the alternate spelling to what is being searched, such as theater in American for theatre in British. Setting your own user Synonym Groups will bring in pages with related words that you decide, such as other word forms of corporation to include corporate and incorporated. All of this changes the ranking for all pages. And if you wanted to make sure that a certain page comes up for a common word, then you could make a user synonym to a less common word that only that page has.

Add search terms to the HTML document's title, meta descriptions, and/or meta keywords. These can also be indexed and searched. Titles are searched by default, and you can turn on the meta searching in your Index Modes options of your account manager. Note: if you turn off body text searching you would really be constraining the searches - but if too many of the same terms are in all documents, something like just searching the titles might give you the control that you want.

Increase the weighting on titles and metas. In addition to indexing the document's title, meta description, and meta keywords, the importance of these parts for ranking can be beefed up by Professional and Premium accounts in the Index Modes section of the account manager. Weighting is not a guarantee of result ordering like Promotions and Demotions, but it can make a difference worth trying!

Invisibly add search terms to the body text. If you don't want to change the text that the reader will see, you can still lure a search to the document by adding hidden words that only PicoSearch will notice. These extra words can include synonyms and variant spellings, so it's a good trick to catch more searches. Note that Professional and Premium accounts get a User Synonyms entry box in the account manager, and that will apply to all pages and all queries. For particular files, the ADDSEARCHTEXT tag is covered in our FAQ on How to Add Text or Links to a Document.

Skip a term in some documents to make it stand out more in others. If a word is very common in all of your documents then it may become watered down, having less influence in ranking and bringing up unrelated documents. If you want to skip the term in all of your searches, see the Set Stopwords feature in your account manager. But if the word is still crucial to certain searches, you may find that a combination of peppering it more in one document plus masking it out in others is needed to force a search result. Skipping a term selectively will make the word more rare and significant for fewer documents overall, as you might imagine. See our FAQ on skipping text at How to Skip Text or Links in a Document.

Try an alternate ranking method. By default, PicoSearch primarily decides how relevant documents are in the search results by number of hits and word rarity; we call this Frequency Relevancy. This gives the results that most people expect, for web pages that are usually pretty short. If you have documents of greatly varying lengths, you may wish to try Weighted Relevancy instead, set in the Ranking Options of your account manager. Weighted Relevancy will bias the ranking toward the shorter documents, since these may be more focused on the topic for the same number of hits per search. It's a quick switch to try, so it's an easy experiment.

Turn word stemming on/off. By default, PicoSearch finds all plural and singular forms of the nouns in your searches, automatically! This is no hack; it is full grammatical reconstruction in 14 different languages. But if you want you can turn it off, in the Set Synonyms & Spelling section of your account manager.

Randomize your search results. It may seem odd to randomize the results of a search engine, but this can serve to continually juggle the document rankings, like for competing customers on a portal. Randomizing is done before Promotions and Demotions so that additional ranking can be enforced. For details, see this FAQ: What if I want to alternate the top results?.