Lucene/Solr Revolution 2017

Search practitioners often overlook the user's entire journey to seek and find. Users strike out with broad searches, unsure what they'll find. They begin with broader concepts (such as 'laptop bag'). The results give them an overview of what's possible. They refine with finer grained distinctions. 'Childs Laptop bag' or 'satchel bag.' They continue to refine to narrower or adjacent concepts until they purchase or give up.

In this talk, I walk through how we build semantic search with Solr based on how users mentally structure your information. They key is taxonomies! I walk through how we generate taxonomies from search logs to build hierarchical synonyms, hypernyms, and hyponyms. I then discuss how manipulate relevance scoring to get the effect user's expect: high recall and a broad overview on broad queries and high precision on narrower queries. I go on to discuss a practice for refining managed taxonomies based on evolving user behavior, ever evolving to findability nirvana!