I am searching for a tool that can be used to tune custom or existing ranking models in SharePoint Search. Is there any tool available for this purpose or we have to tune ranking algorithm manually using query rules, dynamic reordering rules or other available options in Search Service Application?

• Edited by ahsan.abbas Friday, March 22, 2013 12:14 PM

Hello, 

I described one option to debug ranklog calculation in my blog - Explain Rank page http://powersearching.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/explain-rank-in-sharepoint-2013-search 

Tuning using query tools- yes, i'm afraid manually so far.

Tuning of ranking model - Sharepoint 2013 uses state-of-art algorithm to calculate document relevancy. Simply put it calculates values for various features (BM25 score, term proximity, click through and others) and then mix them together non linearly using neural network (configured in ranking model) which has ~70 floating point coefficients to tune.  

Now I'm preparing a blog post with in-depth explanation of how scores are computed, how to debug and how understand impact of each component. I will cover the topic of tuning coefficients in ranking model as well. Simply put : all you need is to collect a lot of so called "Query Judgments" - user feedbacks of search performance, and then "train" your model using machine learning approach. 

Subscribe to my blog if you're interested in updates regarding relevancy stuff in Sharepoi

You might want to review this blog post as well. It describes approach of Microsoft to their own Enterprise Search deployment and relevancy tuning. This should give the idea why it's not an easy topic. I strongly believe that described concept is technology agnostic and can be applied to any version of SharePoint Search.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb499682(v=office.12).aspx

Thanks Alexey, answers from your side are really helpful and i have seen your blog post before.

But at present I am searching for some tool that can be used to create Custom Ranking Model. Without some available tool it will be difficult to create ranking models, as at present not much help is available regarding models and search algorithms used in SharePoint 2013.

Hi, 

you might want to find more details on this here

http://powersearching.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/how-sharepoint-2013-ranking-models-wor

You might want to find some additional details here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn169052.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/library/7c8ddec1-c8ff-4a90-afae-387b27a653f1.aspx

check these two articles , that should be helpful

TechNet: Overview of search result ranking in SharePoint Server 2013 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn169065.aspx

MSDN: Customizing ranking models to improve relevance in SharePoint 2013 -

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn169052.aspx

Hi 

Yes the custom rank model available but I am not sure if this template officially available or not. As I saw the Microsoft SharePoint conference video on "Optimize Search Relevance in SharePoint 2013"and there was demonstrate how to create new custom rank model using tuning tool Publish new model.

Please go through this video...

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/SharePoint-Conference/2012/SPC145

Thanks 

Basant Pandey

Blog: sharepointfordeveloper.blogspot.com