Field Prioritization

This menu item gives options for defining weightings for individual fields. A list of all fields in the current FACT-Finder search database is shown in a table.

Click the check box Similarity Search (1) to determine whether the field contents should be searched during similarity search. An exception to this could be the article number field. Use the Exact search (2) check box and the pattern to the right (3) to define a search template that requires the content of this field to be matched exactly, rather than fuzzily.

Please note, that fields should only be searched with either similiarity search or exact search. If a field is designated for both searches, FACT-Finder will place an orange frame around it and prompt this as a potential error.

Set the reduction value (4) of individual fields to specify how important individual fields are in relation to the others and the weighting that should be applied accordingly in the search algorithm.

Deprioritising a field is useful, when the field should be considered in the search, but the contents have limited informational value. For example: extended descriptive text. Reducing the value of such a field makes a term matching in this field less relevant during search compared to a term matching the product’s name. This reduction in field weight does not directly correspond to an absolute reduction of value performed by a ranking rule. A reduction of a field weight by 30% normally results in a reduction of overall relevance by approximately 6%.

Searching a high number of fields and a lot of content can have a negative impact on search speed. For that reason, you should set fields that do not contain important information for the search to non-searchable. The weighting of fields does not affect speed, just the quality of results.

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