Query Scoping
Part of the Query Understanding series by Daniel Tunkelang.
Overview
Query scoping determines which part of a catalog or content collection a query should be searched against. Many queries implicitly target a specific domain or category, and restricting the search space accordingly improves both relevance and the usefulness of refinement options shown to the user. Scoping is typically achieved by classifying queries against a category taxonomy, using historical behavior to learn associations between query language and catalog segments. The hard cases are ambiguous queries that could reasonably belong to multiple categories, and rare queries where there isn’t enough historical data to make a confident prediction. Getting scope right also determines which facets and filters are shown — a well-scoped query surfaces attributes meaningful to that category rather than a generic set.
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