Digital Library Federation Forum, April 12, 2006
Unbundling the ILS: Deploying an e-commerce catalog search solution
A study in relevance
nAre search results in Endeca more likely to be relevant to a user’s query than search results in Web2 OPAC?
n100 topical user searches from 1 month in fall 2005
nHow many of top 5 results relevant?
–51% relevant in Web2 OPAC; 31 no hits
–69% relevant in Endeca catalog; 12 no hits
So we mentioned that relevance seems to be of critical importance to undergraduate users – we need to get good results on the first page and preferrably in the top 5. It’s also critically important if we want to begin feeding the top X results from a search into other areas – like our quick site search.
Decrease in no results searches in Endeca mostly due to spelling correction and automatic stemming. This shows that Endeca performs 33% better at getting relevant hits into the top 5 results. Relevance was judged subjectively.