Relevance in search results

By default, search results are sorted in order of descending relevance.

What is relevance in the context of search results?

Relevance is a calculation of the similarity, measured across several lines of comparison, between your search text and the content of the resources in your Collibra environment.

In a set of search results, the relevance of each resource is represented by a positive number, or score. The higher the score, the more relevant the resource is to your search text.

How are relevance scores derived?

To derive relevance scores, the Collibra search engine uses a combination of query clauses and boost factors.

Query clauses

When you perform a search, the Collibra search engine queries the database, using various query clauses. Each query clause compares the similarity between your search text and your Collibra resources, along a different line of comparison.

The following are example objectives of different query clauses:

• Calculate the similarity between the spelling of your search term and the term found in a field in the database.
• Calculate how frequently your search term appears in a field. The more often it appears, the greater the relevance. A field containing five occurrences of a given term is more likely to be relevant than a field containing one occurrence of the term.
• Calculate the occurrence percentage of a term among all words in a particular field.
  For example, if your search term occurs twice in the 10-word description of an asset, that asset will have a higher relevance score than an asset for which your search term occurs twice in its 20-word description.

Boosting

Search boost factors allow you to influence the order of the search results. You can edit search boost factors to increase or decrease the importance of a resource type, field or asset type, in the search ranking.

For more information on boosting, see Search boost settings.