Read the blog, watch the video version of this Kata
In this first Kata, we're going to take the query 'notebook' that we know is bad, and see if we can improve it using Active Search Management. How do we know that the results for the query notebook is bad? Easy, just take a look at it in our Chorus Electronics store ;-).
Visit the web store at http://localhost:4000/ and make sure the drop down has Default Algo next to the search bar selected. Now do a search for notebook, and notice that while the products are all vaguely related to notebooks, none of them are actual notebook computers. We believe that our users, when they type in notebook, are looking for notebook computers, or possibly a paper notebook (which we don't carry as we are a electronics store), not accessories to notebooks!
So what can we do? Well, first off, just by looking at the search results, we have a intuitive understanding of the problem, but we don't have a good way of measuring the problem. How bad are our search results for these two queries? Ideally we would have a numerical (quantitative) value to measure the problem.
Enter Quepid. Quepid provides two capabilities. The first is an ability to easily assess the quality of search results through a web interface. This is perfect for working with a Business Owner or other non technical stakeholders to talk about why search is bad, and gather input on the results to start defining what good search results are for our queries.
The second capability is a safe playground for playing with relevancy tuning parameters, though we won't be focusing on that in this Kata.
Open up Quepid at http://localhost:3000. Go ahead and sign up through the OpenID link.
Since you have already gone through the Movie Demo setup, we'll need to set up a new case!
Go ahead and start a new case by clicking Relevancy Cases dropdown and choosing Create a Case.
Let's call the case Notebook Computers. Then, instead of the default Solr instance, let's go ahead and use our Chorus Electronics index using this URL:
http://localhost:8983/solr/ecommerce/select
Click the ping it link to confirm we can access the ecommerce index.
On the How Should We Display Your Results? screen we can customize what information we want to show our Business Owner:
- Title Field:
title - ID Field:
id - Additional Display Fields:
thumb:img_500x500, name, brand, product_type
We want to show our Merchandizer enough information about our products so they can understand the context of our search, but not so much they are overwhelmed!
On the next screen lets go ahead and add our problem queries notebook and laptop.
Complete the wizard, and now you are on the main Quepid screen.
Alert! Sometimes in Quepid when you complete the add case wizard there is a odd race condition and the Updating Queries message stays on the screen instead of going way. Just reload the page ;-).
Now, I like to have two browser windows side by side, the Chorus Electronics store open on the left, and Quepid on the right. You should see the same products listed in both.
Since we are going to pretend we have a Merchandizer rating our individual results, we want to have a more sophisticated grading scale than the default binary one, of "0 - Irrelevant" or "1 - Relevant". In Quepid, click Select Scorer and choose the nDCG@10 one from the list.
nDCG is a commonly used scorer that attempts to measure how good your results are against a ideal set of results, and it penalizes bad search results that show up at the top of the list more than bad results that show up at the end of the list.
Our scorer is a graded scorer, from 0 to 3, from 0 being irrelevant, i.e the result "makes the user mad to see the result", to 3, an absolutely unequivocally perfect result.
Most ratings end up in the 1 for poor or irrelevant and 3 for good or relevant rating.
Our nDCG@10 scorer is setup to only look at the first ten results on the page, so think about if you are doing Mobile optimization and your users only have a small amount of screen real estate. We could do of course do @20 or @40 if we wanted to measure more deeply.
We'll go more deeply into scorers in another Kata. To save some time, we've already done some rating for you.
In Quepid, click Import from the toolbar and you'll be in the import modal.
Pick the ratings file that we already created for you from ./katas/Chorus_Electronics_basic.csv. You'll see a preview of the CSV file. Click Import and Quepid will load up these ratings and rerun your queries. Notice the frog icon went away, that is telling you you don't have any query results that need assessment from the business ;-)
So here is the good news/bad news. Yes our search results are terrible, with a score of 0.14 (on a normalized scale of 0 to 1). However now we have a numerical value of our search results, and can now think about fixing them!
So now let's think about how we might actually improve them? There are a lot of ways we could skin this cat, however for ecommerce use cases, one really powerful option is the Querqy query rewriting library for Solr and Elasticsearch. We won't go into the technical details of how Querqy works with Solr in this Kata.
To make it easier for the Search Product Manager to do Searchandizing, we will use the Search Management UI, or SMUI. Open up http://localhost:9000 and you will be in the management screen for the Ecommerce Demo.
Arrange your screens so the Chorus Electronics store and SMUI are both visible.
Because we are working with the Querqy library, in the Chorus Electronics store, make sure to change form the Default Algo in the dropdown next to the search bar to the Querqy Live. Do a search for notebook, and while the initial product images may look good to you, remember, they aren't images of notebooks, they are notebook accessories that we are getting back! While we are at it, let's also check laptop as well.
Let's start working on the query notebook by typing it in on the left in SMUI under Search or Create Search Rules text box. Click New and you get an empty rules set.
Lets start with filtering notebook to just those products. Add a new search rule and pick UP/DOWN rule. We'll pick a boost of UP(++++), so pretty heavy boost, and then put in product_type as the Solr Field, and the Rule Term should be notebook. This will boost products tagged with the notebook category up in the search results.
Go ahead and click Save search rules for input and then let's push our change to Solr by clicking the Push Config to Solr and then Publish to LIVE.
Go ahead and do a new query in the store, notice the improvements in the quality for notebook? However we're seeing some cable locks and screen protectors showing up. So let's go ahead and add some rules, and take care of notebook while we are at it:
You can save and push the config as you add rules and then look at the store to see the changes. Play with the rules!
Now that we have a qualitative sense that we've improved our results using Querqy, lets go ahead and see if we can make this a quantifiable measure of improvement. Lets see if we can give a number to our stakeholder on improving these notebook related queries.
We'll flip back to Quepid to do this.
We need to tell Quepid that we've done some improvement using the querqy query parser, instead of the default query parser. For this, we need our Tune Relevance pane. Click the Tune Relevance link and you will be in the Query Sandbox. Append to the end of the existing query template q=#$query## the command to tell Solr to use the Querqy query parser by specifying the relevant parameter: &useParams=visible_products,querqy_algo. Then click the Rerun My Searches! button.
Notice that our results have now turned green across the board from red? Our graph has also improved from our dismal measurement of 0 to an almost perfect result of 0.94!
There is a lot to unpack in here that is beyond the scope of this kata. However bear with me.
So now we feel like this is good results. However, while we've just tuned these notebook examples, what has the impact of the Querqy rule changes been on potentially other queries? Quepid is great for up to 60 or so queries per case, but it doesn't handle 100's or 1000's of queries well. Plus, we only get one search metric, in our case NDCG at a time.
That all folks! You've successfully taken a bad 'notebook' query, assessed it to put a numerical value on the quality of the search, and then improved it using some rules to rewrite the query. You then remeasured, saw the quantitative improvement, and then ran a simulated regression test of those queries (and all your other ones in the real world), and have meaningfully improved search quality, which drives more revenue!