Home » 2015 » September » 11

Daily Archives: 2015-09-11

Help!

Problem? Check out the OLS Knowledge Base or open a ticket by emailing support@cuny-ols.libanswers.com.

Personalize your OneSearch results!

As of mid-August, OneSearch users have the ability to personalize their results right from within the search screen. (Previously, this was only possible from within “My Account” in the user’s personal settings.) What does this mean? Basically, users can provide context for their queries.

The ambiguous search term “magnet,” for example, provides over 66,000 results:

Screenshot of CUNY OneSearch results page for query 'magnet' (no personalization)

Without any personalization, OneSearch doesn’t know which results are more relevant so it floats reference entries to the top of the result list. However, with some context, OneSearch is able to recalculate relevancy and re-position the results so the more relevant results appear on the first page of results.

For example, that same search for “magnet” within the context of the “Sciences” floats certain results to the top:

Screenshot of CUNY OneSearch results page for query 'magnet' (personalized for the 'Sciences' discipline)

Within the context of “Education,” though, other results for “magnet” (previously buried within the thousands of other results) appear at the top:

Screenshot of CUNY OneSearch results page for query 'magnet' (personalized for 'Education' discipline)

In addition to choosing a discipline for personalization, there is also an option to float newer results to the top for cases where that makes sense:

Screenshot of CUNY OneSearch's 'Personalize Your Results' pop-up menu

The results themselves never change, assuming the query remains the same. Personalizing results, instead, changes the relevancy of the returned results. This applies, therefore, only to results that are sorted by relevancy—which is the default sort order in OneSearch.

Another nice bonus of this updated OneSearch feature is that it clearly states, at the top of a user’s results, that the records the user is seeing are personalized. If the user wants to change the context or remove the personalization, it can easily be done from the results page:

Screenshot of CUNY OneSearch 'Personalize Your Results' links on the results page

We hope this helps your users find more relevant results in OneSearch!