Playfab Search OrderBy Relevance

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Jordan Parkinson asked Jul 10, '23

Playfab Search OrderBy Relevance

Hey there!

I have around 2000 UGC items in my game that players can upload and share with others. I have come to notice that many players like to name their creations based on elemental properties (eg. "Fire Sword" for a red sword). This leads to 10+ items named exactly "Fire Sword", but with vastly different descriptions.

I am just curious how the search OrderBy Relevance is determined? From my own experience, it is the item's name that is the sole factor in relevance, but I can't then determine the priority of other factors eg. descriptions or display properties etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you! :)

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Answer 1 · 2023-07-10T16:37:13Z

kylemc@microsoft.com answered Jul 10, '23

You're discussing two concepts here that are worth discussing separately; Ordering and Relevance.

Ordering is predictable when you call SearchItems without a Search term. As Neils describes, there's a well-known ordering algorithm. While ordering by Id is predictable, it isn't very useful. Consider whether you want to show things like "new items" or "highly-rated items" and adjust the OrderBy parameter to suit your needs.

Relevancy is harder to predict. It combines input from Title, Description, Keywords, and any DisplayProperties you configure as "Searchable Strings". It can also factor in things like Rating if you put those in the OrderBy clause, but it's much harder to know exactly why it's returning what it is.

Here's a write up of some of the tech used in determining Relevance.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/index-similarity-and-scoring

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Jordan Parkinson commented · Jul 11, 2023 at 01:05 AM

Amazing! Thank you so much for your response Kyle!

Is there a specific scoring profile for Playfab searches, that would be super helpful in understand what limits we should put in place for UGC creation?

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kylemc@microsoft.com Jordan Parkinson commented · Jul 11, 2023 at 03:10 PM

I don't have a specific profile to share. We're always looking for ways to improve relevancy in our default product and may update the profile from time to time. In general, the more data you provide in the fields I listed, the more differentiated your items become and the better a scoring algorithm works. If your items only provide the Title "Fire Sword", there isn't a whole lot a search algorithm can do.

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Answer 2 · 2023-07-10T09:57:36Z

Neils Shi answered Jul 10, '23

The order of search results is determined by the parameter “OrderBy” which you set in the API SearchItems’s request body. For more info, you can refer to Search - PlayFab | Microsoft Learn. And our document also mentions that “If no OrderBy value is passed, a default id asc value is used.” So, if you don’t set the “OrderBy” parameter, the results of search are sorted in ascending order by item ID.

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Jordan Parkinson commented · Jul 11, 2023 at 01:03 AM

Hey! Thank you so much for your answer.

I have the API request to search OrderBy Relevance. That was what my question was referring to; how the 'relevance' is determined between pieces of content. Sorry for the confusion!

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