Notes:
- most other search engines(Solr, Elastic) inherit their ranking from an Engine called Lucene developed in 1999
- For. agiven Query a Lucene based engine will use its algorithm to compute a single score per results and order all results according to those values.
- Pure-textual relevance and other paramaters are mixed into this hard-to-debug numeric value
- ALgolia uses a tie-breaking algorithm
- "n" Rules applied in succession
- The tie-breaking algotithm is called "The Ranking Formula"
8 Rules applied in succession
- initially all matching records are sorted by the first criterion e.g. Rule1(Color)
- If any records are tied those are then sorted by the second criterion e.g Rule2(Edge)
- If there are still records tied then those are then sorted according to the third Criterion and so.
Here is Algolias 8 ranking/sorting rules
- Rule 1 - TYPO
- Rule 2 - GEO
- Rule 3 - WORDS
- Rule 4 - FILTERS
- Rule 5 - PROXIMITY
- Rule 6 - ATTRIBUTE
- Rule 7 - EXACT
- Rule 8 - CUSTOM
- This one is key for injecting our own business data
- Ranking is clear and easy to understand No More black box
- Modify rules order and add custom rules
Here are three examples which should highlight how powerful and Debt free Algolia really is
- Ecommerce
- Media
- Mobile
Ecommerce.
As a User looking to buy a new iPhone I want to see the latest version at the top as opposed to the old one or some accessories