Promotions Tab

Studio > Relevance > Relevance Modeling > Promotions Tab


Precedence of Features

A Relevance Model applies Global Filters first, then Ranking, followed by Rules, and finally Promotions.

Sections:

Simple Promotions

The Promotions Tab of SearchStax Studio’s Model Details screen lets you “promote” a search result to the top of the list of matching items. Multiple results can be promoted and their order defined. 

First, create or select a promotion from the list:

The next step is to enter a query that will trigger this promotion. In this case, the promotion will be triggered when the search query contains the phrase “best practice.”

Note that the promotion can be triggered by either an “Exact Match” or a “Contains” match.

  • Exact Match: The search string must exactly match the trigger phrase. Any variation will invalidate the match.
  • Contains: The search string must contain all of the words used in the trigger, but can have other words as well.

Note that the “Contains” match does not do substring matching. The match is based on whole words only.

The next step is to pull up a list of documents that should contain the items we want to promote. In this case, we searched for documents containing “best practice.” Solr returned 155 indexed results. The highest-scoring ten matches appeared in the left-side column.

Click on any result to move it to the Promoted Items column. 

The promoted items can be ordered using Move Up and Move Down buttons. 

When this Search Experience is active, and when Solr receives a query about best practices, the promoted items will appear at the top of the results list. Each promoted result contains a special field value ([elevated]:true) so your UI can emphasize that result as special in some way. 

There are two search modes used for nominating a list of potential promotions. One is a general search; the other is highly specific.

Default Search

The default search mode works for most common searches. Just enter a keyword or phrase and see a list of matching results.

This is usually adequate to find the items you want to promote, but sometimes the result list is very long. To avoid paging and scrolling, you could try the Advanced Search.

Advanced Search

Sometimes you know exactly the item you want to promote. If you know the item’s ID number or URL, among other fields, you can target it more specifically.

Advanced Search uses Solr’s field:value syntax, such as url:“https://www.searchstax.com/docs/searchstax-cloud-solr-backups/”. In the example below, we used the Advanced Search to locate that specific document and then added it to the promotion.

Other examples of valid searches:

  • id:”ed55498c-1f34-395d-963f-c79e1679ffee”
  • tm_X3b_en_content_type:”blog” +meta_author:”Tom”
  • navigationtitle_t_fr:”psychologie clinique programme”
  • year_published:2022

External Promotions

In addition to being able to promote content from your index, you can also highlight external items, such as event sites, content on partner pages, advertisements and commerce.

First you will need to create an External Item. This item appears in the left column of the External Items view of the Promotions Tab.

  1. Go to the External Items tab.
  2. Click Create.
  3. Enter a title, description and URL, then finish creation. (You cannot use the same URL for more than one external item.)

You can always go back to edit these fields or delete any external item created.

Once you’ve clicked on an external item to move it to the Results list then published, the item will appear at the top of your results – above your indexed items promotion and rest of the search results. 

Questions?

Do not hesitate to contact the SearchStax Support Desk.