SharePoint 2007 Search Relevance

There are different factors which affect the relevance of search results in SharePoint 2007. I like to take a minute of your time to point some of those factors.

Document Title: Title is heavily weighted. If, however, the document title doesn’t exist, SharePoint will try to extract it from the document. This extraction only applies to Microsoft Office documents and not other file types. Many times what SharePoint automatically extracts is not correct so make sure that you add a title to the document.

URL Depth relevance: SharePoint cares about how deep the URL is from the root. The deeper it is the less relevant the document is from the search result. Notice, though, that URL depth is different than URL length. SharePoint counts the number of slashes “/” in the URL. The more slashes, the less relevant the document is.

Relevant Click Distance: SharePoint cares how many clicks a document is from the Authoritative page. The farther (more clicks) it is, the less relevant the document is to the search. It is imperative that Authoritative pages are defined to produce good search results.

Language Detection: Documents in the same language will have higher relevance than documents in other languages.

Document Types: Some documents types are considered of higher relevance than others. The list below show the relevance of document types in decreasing order of relevancy.

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· Web Pages

· PowerPoint

· Word

· XML

· Excel

· Text

· List Items

There is one more factor that determines relevance which is very important. And that is the User Feedback. Basically is how a particular document is “viewed” or “accepted” by the user community.

Assume that two documents (Document A and Document B) have the same relevance so far using the factors mentioned above. The User Feedback might determine which document will be more relevant in the end. See this example below:

As you can see, determining the relevance of a document is not a trivial matter.

According to IDC users spend an average of 3.5 hours a week searching but not getting the proper result. The Delphi Group reports that 62% of the users are dissatisfied with the search result. And they also report that 73% of people spend more than 4 hours per week searching. Note: These are not SharePoint specific statistics but overall search experience statistics.