OSC – 2013 in Review

Quepid

Our Search Relevancy Collaboration Canvas

Quepid helps you leverage the expertise of content curators and technologists to measure how search quality is changing over time. With Quepid, content curators enter the queries that are important to them, rating the quality of individual search results. For example, a search on a legal site for “car tax” will return several relevant and irrelevant results. Content experts can indicate through Quepid which results ought to surface in the top 3, top 10, or are completely irrelevant.

Armed with this data, technologists can engage in “Test Driven Relevancy” -- working to match up the search algorithm to user expectations. Moreover, as the search algorithm changes over time, Quepid shows how search quality has changed. Most importantly, technologists can easily demonstrate the changes to content curators, getting immediate feedback to their algorithm changes.

Quepid has revolutionized how we approach search relevancy engagements. Before Quepid, we’d have success solving individual search problems. There was no ability to measure impact or demonstrate holistic progress across many search queries. Quepid is especially useful when search relevancy needs to be balanced by several variables.

One client in particularly that has gotten a lot of use from Quepid is Silverchair Information Systems. Dealing with extremely technical search relevancy problems in the field of medical search, Quepid helped us gather all the relevancy requirements and expectations. For Silverchair’s work with the American Medical Association’s research journal search, this involved carefully balancing the recency of research articles with their relevancy to the user’s query.

With Quepid medical experts identified representative search queries and identified which results should be coming up first. Armed with this data, OpenSource Connection’s search relevancy expertise was brought to bear. We helped develop a very precise search scoring system, targeted specifically to the information that Silverchair’s medical experts provided. Here’s what one of these experts had to say about Quepid:

Quepid has been a game-changer for us in the arena of search relevancy testing. With Quepid, the team can see the impact of planned search tuning changes immediately instead of waiting until changes are made live. Quepid’s search version comparison capability also allows us to understand how potential downstream results may be affected by each change, so we can select the version that’s best for the product. We’ve solved and avoided numerous customer issues, and I’ve been able to feel more confident that my feedback on search quality directly funnels into our search relevancy algorithm. Thanks, Quepid!