How to turn off spelling corrections which are returning irrelevant search results?

Answer

  1. Select the relevant collection and goto the Pipelines section from your console. (Reach out to us via Service desk if you do not have access to the Pipelines section)

  2. Select the latest website pipeline and replace the following step:

- id: index-spelling
  params:
    model:
      const: default
    phraseLabelWeights:
      const: query:1.0,headings:0.05
    text:
      bind: q
CODE

with

- id: index-text
CODE

3. Save the pipeline and set it as default.

The spelling corrections will now be turned off. Try testing a few queries to ensure that the change has been made.

For website search collections, we enable spelling corrections as default. The spelling model is trained from your data and uses a probabilistic match to include likely close misspellings. Any spelling mistakes that are within an edit distance of two will likely be included in the result set.

We bias towards including potential matches (even when some will be wrong) rather than only returning exact matches search terms (which might include spelling mistakes). The order of these spelling alternatives is sorted by probability, so the most relevant ones will still rank higher.

The impact of turning spellings off is that when people misspell things, for example, “webste”, they will get zero results. Keep in mind that around 25% of queries are misspelled, so for most cases, turning off spelling corrections results in worse overall search performance.