How to get a particular post to the top of search results?
I've read this blog post about how our search works.
However, I've got a particular usecase that I can't quite get to work the way that Expensify wants it to.
One of the top things that users look for on Expensify's community is "Email Receipts"
If you search that you'll see the following results:
The problem is that they want the second result (green arrow) to be the first result.
If I compare the two:
Top result "What are some common reasons why forwarding a receipt to Expensify doesn't work"
- posted Oct 8 edited Nov 12th
- most recent comment Oct 8th
- score (points) = 0
- has been 'sunk'
- discussion with comment
Second (but we wish it was first!) result: "Where to email receipts (to get them into your Expensify expenses!)"
- posted Sept 18th edited Nov 13th
- most recent comment Today at 821 am
- score (points) = 37 (includes 7 promotes) + one comment with a score of 5
- question which contains accepted answer + two other answers (not accepted not rejected)
So how the heck do we get #2 to the #1 place for Expensify?
Any advice is appreciated!
Comments
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My understanding is that advanced search currently only uses text matches for ranking. I'd think they would need the text to match the query more than the first result.
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Wait so is this blog post written by @Todd no longer relevant?
Making Search Smarter
We put in a lot of work under the hood to make our search smarter. Ideally, when you type some words in a searchbox you want to find something that exactly matches what you had in mind when you started typing. In reality, all we can do is find stuff that contains the same words or word forms that you typed. Where the search gets smart is in ranking those search results. The smartest search will put the best results near the top. But what determines the "bestness" of a search result? Well, there a few factors that go into search ranking.
How many of the words you typed are in the search result? Most search engines incorporate this criteria when ranking your search results. The algorithms involved take a combination of the number of words, the rarity of words, and the order of the words you typed. All these factors are put into a match quality ranking.
How new or old is the content being searched? Forums generate content at an incredibly fast pace. That content can get stale pretty quickly too. We found that sorting on keyword match quality only would show too many stale, useless results. We found that it's absolutely necessary to take into account how new or old content is when doing community search. You might be interested to know that this was our only sort criteria in the previous iteration of our search.
How good is the content? As I said in the previous point: forums generate a lot of content and not all of it is good. Well, with our reactions system we provide users with a way of curating the content in your community. When users react positively to a post then it increases in score. When users react negatively to a post then it decreases in score. This score contributes to a post's search rank.
https://blog.vanillaforums.com/product/crafting-a-better-forum-search
No longer relevant or true? This makes it sound like we do include things like reactions/points and length of time? If this is not the case we should ditch that blog post.
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Todd linked me that blog post recently and I’m like 98% sure it’s still true.
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My post was incorrect.
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