Query Rewriting: An Overview
Part of the Query Understanding series by Daniel Tunkelang.
Overview
Query rewriting is a family of techniques that transform the user’s original query into a different formulation better suited to the search system’s capabilities. The goal is always to close the gap between how the user expressed their intent and how the system can best serve it. Different rewriting strategies address different problems: adding terms when the query is too narrow, removing terms when it is too specific to return results, normalizing equivalent expressions, or correcting errors. Rewriting can be done with hand-crafted rules for well-understood patterns, learned from historical query and click data, or generated by models trained on reformulation tasks. Measuring the impact requires balancing recall, precision, and the fraction of queries actually affected — rewriting that helps the tail of queries should not harm the head.
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