Fine-Tuning Search Results and Guiding Users

With well-structured content and a search page in place, your search experience is ready for tuning. While Liferay's default relevance is a strong starting point, you can go beyond this standard behavior to actively guide users to the best content. Liferay provides several no-code tools to refine search results, control what appears for specific queries, and help users formulate better searches.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use Liferay’s search tuning tools, including Result Rankings, Synonym Sets, and Search Suggestions.

Manually Adjusting Search Results

Liferay’s Result Rankings feature enables you to manually adjust the order of search results for specific terms. You do this by pinning one or more assets to appear at the top of the results for those terms, or hiding assets you don’t want to appear at all. This bypasses the search engine’s standard relevance scores used to rank items. The rest of the results continue to follow the algorithm, but your pinned choices override it for those specific queries.

Re-Ranking Key Assets

When you pin assets, you’re manually re-ranking results by promoting some assets over others. You can activate and deactivate the result rankings rules as you need.

Pinning specific results is especially useful in these scenarios:

• High-traffic keywords (e.g., ‘shipping,’ ‘cleaning,’ ‘warranty’)
• Seasonal or time-sensitive content (e.g., ‘holiday hours,’ ‘promo return windows’)
• Avoiding confusion when similar assets exist (e.g., multiple product PDFs)

For example, when customers search for “return policy,” Clarity wants their official, up-to-date document to appear as the first result. With Result Rankings, you can pin this asset to the top position for that query.

Hiding Unwanted Results

You can also use the Result Rankings tool to hide specific assets from appearing for certain search terms. This gives you fine-grained control to remove irrelevant or outdated content from high-impact search queries.

Hiding specific results is especially useful in these scenarios:

• Superseded documents or pages that have been replaced by a newer version.
• Legacy or archived content that should not appear in general search results.
• Content that is valid but irrelevant to a specific, high-traffic search query.

For example, when customers search for “return policy,” Clarity can hide out-of-date articles and other content that doesn't pertain to returns (e.g., Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy). This helps ensure that users only see current and relevant information.

Bridging Vocabulary Gaps with Synonyms

Your users don’t always search using the same words that appear in your content. Liferay’s Synonyms application helps to bridge this gap. With it, you can manually define alternative terms and phrases that the engine should treat as interchangeable during search. You define and apply these synonym sets at the instance level.

For example, Clarity customers might use:

• ‘Specs’ and ‘Spectacles’ instead of ‘glasses’
• ‘Readers’ instead of ‘reading glasses’
• ‘Anti-glare’ instead of ‘blue light filter’

By defining these as synonyms, you make it much more likely that a user will find the right content, even if they don’t use your team’s internal vocabulary.

Suggesting Better Search Phrases

Sometimes users mistype a search term or use a phrase that returns no results. Liferay’s Suggestions widget can get them back on track. Once you’ve added the widget to your search page, it can provide two types of helpful nudges:

• "Did you mean..." Suggestions: Corrects common typos based on the spell check index.
• Related Queries: Suggests an alternative query that is known to produce more results.

Once enabled, these suggestions are automatically generated based on indexed content and search patterns. This feature is especially useful for catching typos or wording variations. For example, if Clarity’s customers type “antiglair” instead of “anti-glare,” the Suggestions widget can point them in the right direction so they don’t run into a dead end. See Enabling Search Suggestions for more information.

Dynamically Tuning Search Bar Queries

For more dynamic tuning needs, you can use Liferay’s Custom Filter widget. This powerful tool adds pre-defined query clauses to a user's search, giving you enhanced control over the results without requiring any user interaction.

These are some common use cases for the Custom Filter widget:

• Boosting Promoted Content: Automatically increase the relevance score for any content with specific metadata (e.g., tag, category).
• Excluding Specific Content: Automatically filter out certain types of content, such as all support policy PDFs, from a general site search.

For example, Clarity could use the Custom Filter to automatically boost all products in their "Summer Sale" category or to exclude internal distributor documents from their public site's search results.

Search Tuning as an Ongoing Activity

Pinning, hiding, and defining synonyms are all part of search tuning. This is not a one-time setup; search behavior should evolve alongside your content and your users. Consider running through a search tuning checklist periodically:

• Identify content that performs poorly or is missing from key searches.
• Adjust ranking rules based on current business priorities or seasonal needs.
• Expand your synonym sets as you become aware of new user terminology.

At Clarity, this might mean boosting new product lines during launch season, suppressing outdated help articles after a policy change, or adding synonyms for a new technology trend (like “blue light blocking” becoming “screen shield”). Even just a few well-placed tuning rules can make search feel dramatically more intelligent and helpful.

Conclusion

Fine-tuning search is about actively guiding users toward what’s most helpful. By using tools like Result Rankings and Synonym Sets, you can go from being a bystander to an active partner in the search experience. This ongoing process of tuning ensures your search evolves with your content and continues to meet your users' needs.

Next, you’ll help fine-tune Clarity’s search experience.