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Feedback: Updating and adapting search results

An important part of delivering a great search experience is adapting the results to meet your business and customer expectations. The Objective Search API differs from other search systems in the fact that the results are dynamic and can be tuned based on feedback. There are two types of feedback to consider: explicit and implicit. We’ll go over the differences between each and how both can be used with our system to guide the system towards the kinds of results you expect.

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Types of feedback - explicit and implicit

There are two types of feedback to consider: explicit and implicit. Explicit feedback is feedback where we definitively know what is expected for the results. For example, when a result is given a thumbs up or down, we know for sure that this person liked or disliked the result. Implicit feedback is feedback where we can’t determine definitively whether the result is expected or not. An example of implicit feedback are user clicks. A user could click a result if it’s relevent or irrelevant. Because we never interact with the user we don’t know definitively why they clicked a result.

The type of feedback affects how we utilize the feedback when adjusting ranking. We support both types of feedback, get in touch to discuss which is best for your use case.

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Feedback examples

Examples of explicit feedback include:

• A user giving a rating, for example thumbs up/down or a score 1-5
• A member of your team stating that result 4 is better than result 1 because it is more recent
• A member of your team saying product SKU 123 should be shown in position 1 because it is on sale

Examples of implicit feedback include:

• A user clicking on a search result
• A user purchasing a product after issuing multiple search requests
• A user viewing several pages of search results

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Feedback API

Send feedback to adjust results via the API. This API is in beta, email us and we’d love to get you set up with it.