This search engine glossary was originally created from a number of sources including:
- a list created by members of Relevance Slack
- the glossary section of Search Insights 2022 from The Search Network
Our thanks to everyone who contributed the definitions. We aim to keep it correct & up to date but do please let us know if you spot any errors – there is a form to submit corrections, comments or terms you think need definition at the bottom of this page and on each term page.
Search Engine Glossary
a
- Absolute boosting
- Access control list
- Advanced search
- Aggregated search
- Apache
- Appliance
- Artificial intelligence
- AI
- Auto-categorisation
- Auto-classification
- Average response time
b
- Baseline Search
h
- Hello Search
b
- BERT
- Best bets
- BM25
d
- Default Similarity
b
- Boolean operators
- Boosting
c
- Categorisation
- Chatbot
- Clustering
- Co-occurence
- Cognitive search
- Collection
- Computational linguistics
- Concept
e
- Entity
c
- Concept extraction
- Connector
- Controlled vocabulary
- Conversational search
- COTS
- Crawler
- Cross-language search
d
- Data/Schema Modelling
f
- Fields Engineering
d
- Deep learning
- Description
- Diversity
- Document
- Document processing
- Document repository
e
- Early binding
- Elasticsearch
- Elastic
- Embedding
w
- Word Vector
p
- Paragraph Vector
d
- Document Vector
e
- Enrichment
- Entity extraction
- Exact match
- Explicit judgements
- Exploratory query
b
- Broad search
e
- Exploratory search
f
- Facet
- Fallout
- Feature
- Federated search
- Field query
- Filter
- Findability
- Freshness
- Fuzzy search
g
- Gating
- Golden set
- Guided search
h
- Hit
- Hypothesis-driven
e
- Experiment-driven
i
- Idiom Strategy
- Implicit Judgements
- Index
- Index file
- Indexing
- Information Need
u
- User Intent
i
- Ingestion rate
- Interleaving
- Inverse document frequency (IDF)
- Inverted file
- Inverted Index
s
- Search Index
i
- Inverted index
j
- Jaccard index
- Judgements
r
- Ratings
k
- Keyword
- Keyword search
- Knowledge Graph
s
- Semantic Graph
k
- KPI
l
- Label
- Language detection
- Late binding
- Learning to Rank
- LTR
- Learning-to-rank
- Lemmatisation
- Lexical analysis
- Linguistic indexing
- Linguistics
- Long tail
- Lucene
a
- Apache Lucene
m
- Machine learning
- Meta tag
- Metadata
- Morphologic analysis
n
- Natural language processing
- NLP
- Natural language query
- Neural IR
o
- Ontology
- OpenSearch
p
- Parametric search
- Parsing
- Pattern matching
- Personalization
- Phrase extraction
- Phrase search
- Playbook
- Precision
- Precision and Recall
- Preferred Label (pref label)
- Professional search
- Proximity search
q
- Query by example
m
- More Like This
- MLT
q
- Query Intent
- Query transformation
r
- Ranking
- Recall
- Reindex
- Relevance
- Relevance engineer
- Relevance Score
- Reranking
s
- Search Experience
- Search Metric
- Search Performance
- Search Quality
- Search Relevance
- Search results
- Search terms
- Searchandising
- Semantic analysis
- Semantic Search
c
- Cognitive Search
s
- Sentiment analysis
- SERPs
- Session
- Signal
- Signal Modeling
- SKOS
- Snippet
- Solr
a
- Apache Solr
s
- Soundex search
- spaCy
- Spider
- Stemming
- Stop list
- Stop words
- Stopping distance
- Structured data
- Summarisation
- Survey query
- Synonym
- Synonym expansion
- Syntactic analysis
t
- Targeted query
n
- Navigational search
t
- Taxonomy
o
- Ontology
d
- Dictionary
v
- Vocabulary
s
- Synonym list
t
- Term frequency
- TF IDF
c
- Classic Similarity
t
- Thesaurus
- Thumbnail
- Tiering
- Token
- Tokenising
- Transformer
- Transliteration
- Truncation
u
- Unstructured information
v
- Vector space
w
- Weighting
- Wildcard
- Word exclusion
x
- xAI