jeancochrane
commented
6 years ago One interesting complication to sorting by relevance that we've found in the process of working on https://github.com/datamade/nyc-council-councilmatic/pull/120:
When you're looking for a specific bill, sorting by relevance is usually the only way to find it. As I see it, his is the primary problem raised in this issue. e.g. searching for Resolution 815-2014 returns the wrong result when Date is the ordering:
Using Resolution to order it, however, returns the right bill immediately:
However, when searching for broad keywords like Taxi, the opposite is true! In these cases, sorting by Date shows the freshest bills on that topic:
While sorting by Relevance shows bills that may in fact have many mentions of Taxi in their index, but are from so long ago that they probably aren't relevant to a casual user:
I think the issue here is getting at defining what relevance means to different users. Casual users of the site may find recent bills to be more relevant; power users may want to find specific bills, and so find "exactness and number of word matches" to be more relevant.
A couple of ways forward:
- Move to defaulting to search by relevance, and accept that casual users looking for broad keywords will find worse results
- Continue to default search by date, and add a small call-out by the results explaining that "if you aren't finding a specific bill that you're looking for, try searching by relevance"
- Continue to default search by date, and add a "FAQ" section that explains how to search
fgregg
We encourage the user to search for Resolution 815-2015 but do not return this result. This is likely because when we search we are not automatically sorting by relevance. We should sort by relevance when people enter in search terms.