Boost Entities rule partially working

Search Best Practices - Search Configuration
1

Hi Team,

I am utilizing the “BOOST_ENTITIES” rule to promote an FAQ whenever anyone queries about “service areas”… or “where” this business serves.

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This boost rule works when I query “where are your service areas”…
However, when I query “service areas”, services are still returned first - over the FAQ.

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I’m guessing the term “service” in the query is causing the services vertical to win even over the boost entity rule… but I was wondering if anyone knew specifically how to fix this without having to change too many rules. Currently, this is my Services vertical in my search config:

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Best,
Luc

2

Hey Luc! Query rules unfortunately don’t automatically apply to singular and plural cases – you’ll have to define the rule separately for “service area” vs. “service areas”. I’m wondering if it caught your other case due to it starting with “where”. I would be cautious about the “where” query rule boost as it might catch too many queries, e.g. “Where can I login?” or “Where can I pay my bill?” Hopefully that should fix it - if anyone has a different take on this feel free to comment!

3

Thanks for the answer Cherry!

That makes sense… quickly just went in and set up the same rule for “service areas” as well (plural). I also tried this as a regex to catch both cases but none of the variations have worked… anything else come to mind?

4

Hi Luc,

After testing, applying a boost to the whole FAQs vertical should remedy this issue (see below example config that utilizes a regex).

The reason behind this is that boosting individual entities will typically affect where those entities are returned within that specific vertical, rather than affecting that vertical’s placement in search results relative to other verticals. Sometimes applying an individual entity boost may impact the ordering of verticals in search results, but this is generally when the algorithm has a minor difference in ranking between those verticals.

Your builtin.EntityType filter on Services is strongly ranking the Services vertical on “service area” queries, so in this use case we want to specifically boost the whole FAQs vertical on that query. Additionally, in your example only two FAQs are being returned for this search so you may not need additional rules, but if there was more noise in the FAQ results then we also may want to apply individual entity boost/bury actions to this query.

Search Config to Boost FAQs Vertical on “service area” queries:

"rules": [
    {
      "criteria": {
    "searchTermMatchesRegex": "^.*service area.*"
  },
  "actions": [
    {
      "actionType": "BOOST_VERTICAL_INTENT",
      "boostValue": 5,
      "verticals": [
        "faqs"
      ]
    }
  ]
}
  ],

Let me know if you have any additional questions!