Making search better by tracking & utilizing user search behavior – Talk

Seamless, scalable and easy search is what every developer wants and every business needs. That is exactly what was on the agenda last night at the Los Angeles Django meetup, a mastermind group of professional developers, hobbyists and really curious folks gathered together to discuss their experiences with Django & Python. and two of the talks were around search. We were super excited to be part of the presenters & thanks to the organizers for arranging this!

Improving search experience is a very data driven & iterative process. Measuring the quality of search results and having the tools to measure, make sense and then improve your search ranking algorithms is key to the entire process. We talked through some aspects of how to measure quality for given search results and key metrics that the teams need to track to as they make changes to their search to make it better. Later during the talk, we showed a very basic example of how one can start to incorporate user behavior as part of the search results to influence the ranking of the results.

Slides for the presentation are below – love to hear comments!