Is there a way to visualize the scoring (for a non coder guy)?

[Smyken (Michael Gustafson)]

Hi all
As a non coder (but responsible for our site) I am curios what scores our elastic search are using when ranking search terms (is that the correct wording?).

I often get questions from my colleges why a specific page is higher up in the search result list than other pages. And my answer is "I dont know". For me its like a magic, black box.

Our developers has thankfully added a way for me to see the total score for each result (see image). That is useful in some cases but still dont answer the question why some pages get higher points and some lower?

Can you help me point out which direction I should go from here? How can I find what metrics that is used in the ranking? Is there already a solution that I can use?
Thanks
/Michael

[warkolm (Mark Walkom)]

Welcome to our community!

What Is Relevance? | Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide [2.x] | Elastic is slightly old, the TDIDF the are talking about is now BM25, but the approach is similar enough for you to get started. Explain API | Elasticsearch Guide [7.14] | Elastic is the endpoint they mention, and that takes you into a bit more depth on the scoring aspect.

However with scores like that, I'd take a guess and say that there are some boosts happening in your queries. So you'd need to look at the code that is making the requests to Elasticsearch to understand that.