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, Collibra uses a combination of query clauses and boost factors.
Query clauses
When you perform a search, Collibra 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.
Some examples of the objectives of different query clauses are as follows:
- Calculate the similarity between the spelling of your search text and the text found in a field in the database.
- Calculate how frequently your search text appears in a field. The more often it appears, the greater the relevance. A field containing 5 occurrences of a given text is more likely to be relevant than a field containing 1 occurrence of the text.
- Calculate the occurrence percentage of a text among all words in a particular field.
For example, if your search text 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 text 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, go to Search boost settings.