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Understanding search results

After you run a search you are presented with a search results page divided into tabs. The All tab shows the top three search results for each Resource type and gives you a high level overview of the types of resources you can find in the application. Hover over the Info icon to see the Information Card that gives brief information about the resource. You can use this information to then decide if you need to navigate to the search result to explore it further.

Answers (Eureka Answer™) surface the most relevant concepts from the knowledge graph to the top of search as Top Concept.

  • Who sees the Top Concept?

    • Organizations with the Enterprise License and with a Glossary, see a Top concept (Eureka Answer™) on top of the search results on the All tab.

  • What does it show?

    • This concept card highlights the best matching glossary term. It presents at-a-glance the custom metadata configured by the catalog stewards including descriptions, technical metadata, related people, and resources.

      Note

      The term in the concept card could change as you use filters on the results page to narrow down the search results.

  • How does one interact with the Top Concept?

    • Click the concept card to go the specific search result.

    • Click on links in the concept cards to go to specific resources.

    • When you click the people in the Related people section, a search is done for the person in context of where the user name is clicked. For example, if you click the user name that is a Steward for the current term a search is done for all resources where the user is the Steward (metadata:"Steward:sarah smart").

    search_concept_card.png

If you want, you can use filters on the results page to narrow down the list of results. Click the See all recource_type link in each section to go specific tabs to see all the results returned for that resource.

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Once you get to the tabs, you can see additional information about the resources, such as, when was the last time the resource was updated, how many times it has been used, etc. The additional information on the search results can be useful for determining whether a resource is a good fit for your project. Format, source or provenance, recency, and frequency of citation or popularity are all useful metrics for evaluating data. See evaluating search results for details.

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Ranking and ordering of search results

Search results are displayed in order of most relevant to least relevant results relative to the search term, based on a multifaceted ranking system. A resource that contains more unique terms, displays a closer alignment with the search term, and incorporates the term across various fields or key fields like the title, is considered more relevant compared to resources that don't. Let us understand the different ranking factors using the example of the search term Austin sales reports

Important

Each of these factors contributes individually to the ranking with varying weights, meaning the final outcome cannot always be exactly predicted.

Table 1.

Ranking Factor

Example

How unique is this term relative to the other terms in all resources?

Austin appears much less often than Sales or Reports in all resources, so any instances of the more unique term rank higher than instances of the less unique terms.

How close of a match is this resource to the user’s query?

A resource with Sales Reports in the title will rank higher than a resource with Reports on sales.

How important is the field that matched within this resource?

Sales Reports in the title will rank higher than Sales Reports in the description, because we consider a title to be more important.

How many fields matched on this resource?

A resource that matched on title, description, and tags will rank higher than a resource that matched on title alone.