NASA Portal Search

1
NASA Portal Search Google Appliance Search
Engine Relevance Ranking Test Results http//medi
aservices.nasa.gov/search/search September
2005
2
Initial Setup

• Google indexing
• Initially opened to open discovery.
• More than 13 million documents discovered
• Eliminated some logical groups of documents which
  can be added as separate collections in Verity
  (e.g. 6 million forum threads)
• Eliminated others based on mime type
• Presently Status
• Total indexed Documents 2,262,596
• Total document Crawled 5M
• Total Documents reached by Crawler 6161504
• Total NASA domains crawled 1450

3
Test Methodology

• General Relevance
• Results provided on the first page were ranked on
  a relative scale of 0 to 5 with 5 being the
  highest. The rules used for ranking were
  somewhat subjective, however for a given URL that
  was presented on one engines result the same
  relavence was applied to that URL on the others.
  So, the same weight was carried across all
  engines.
• Authoritative Answers
• Results that were assigned a 5 had to be both
  topically and timely. For example, a result on
  STS-114 from 1999 while topically relevant was
  reduced to a 3 because of it not being timely.
  The authoritative results had to be the exact
  page and not a subordinate page to the exact
  page. Subordinate pages were classified as
  support pages and assigned a weighing of 4

4
Terms tested

• Test terms were based on combination of top 30
  serach terms in the past 6 months as well as the
  top 30 from the month of July. The resulting
  merged list was 36 terms.

solar system  mercury earth worldwind Pluto pictu
res discovery launch iss space station space
shuttle deep impact
Shuttles Shuttle Launch Live Hubble Moon Titan Sat
urn Apollo 11 Jupiter Tsunami Planets Cassini
columbia Countdown Mars challenger webcam apollo  
shuttle countdown clock nasa tv voyager games ve
nus
5
Summary Table of Results
6
Combined Results
7
Synonym Tweaking

• Authoritative relevance improved to 100
• Google provides synonym tools for adding
  authoritative results.
• The following synonyms have been added
• Cassini
• countdown
• images
• live
• nasa
• nasa tv
• picture
• pictures
• shuttle
• shuttle launch
• Shuttles
• http//mediaservices.nasa.gov/search/search

8
Thesaurus integration

• Thesaurus integration
• 95,000 word English Thesaurus
• 22,000 term NASA Thesaurus
• Provides alternative results as
• Broader or narrower terms
• Related terms

9
Functional test to demonstrate features

• keyword sts 114  and click search.  This
  should return NASA - Return to Flight in the
  first line (this is manually added URL)
• keyword a1 and click search.  On the left side
  you should see Are You Looking For items. 
  Click on A-1 aircraft. You should see
  additional categories on the left side. 
• keyword Skyraider aircraft and click search.
  Fourth item in the result set is indented.
• keyword nasa and click search.  This should
  bring up Best Bets item About NASA.  Click on
  About NASA will take you to About NASA page.
• keyword Apollo applications program and click
  search. Third item in the result set is indented
  and it contains More results link.  Click on
  this link to perform site specific search.
• keyword earth resources and click search. 
  This keyword returns a large number of Suggested
  Broader or Narrower Terms and Related Terms,
  use Next and Prev button to navigate through
  these items
• Keyword nasas and click search. Spelling
  correction
• Keyword 3 numeric three . It will suggest the 
  synonym. There are  95,000 definitions of
  synonym,  as well as 22,000 NASA thesaurus terms.

10
Deployment Plan

• Present to the EB Board and Web Managers
• Allow testing by the EB board
• Address and issues that arise
• Target production date 9/22