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Critical AI Training Services: Search Relevance

Why does your brand need it?

“Search relevance” is crucial to many businesses’ success. It measures how closely a company’s internal search engine results meet its users’ needs and intentions. Offering the right search results can be the difference between making a sale and losing a customer. Using AI training services, a company can ensure its internal search engine offers search results that are relevant to users based on users’:

  • Keywords: the words they use in their query

  • Context: where the user lives, their device, search history, etc.

  • Intent: what service or product the user is seeking

Search relevance is also an evaluation of the content offered in search results, including its:

  • Quality: the depth, accuracy, or originality

  • Freshness: how recently it was created

  • Reactions: how the user interacts with it (click-through rates, etc.)

Read our blog to understand the specific ways search relevance impacts customers, plus best practices for using AI training services to improve it.

How Search Relevance Impacts Customers

Search relevance isn’t just a “nice-to-have” anymore. This is due to a few factors. Firstly, user experience is vital in the customer journey. Many websites are now routinely augmenting and auditing their user experience to win on SEO. Other websites should follow suit to be competitive, even if they don’t want to rank high in Google or Bing’s search results. Search relevance is a notable factor in user experience. Potential customers want to easily navigate a website and find the information, products, etc., they seek. They simply expect excellent search relevance, whether consciously or not. With so many website options to visit online, it’s too easy to lose a visitor and possible customer due to suboptimal search relevance.

The second way search relevance impacts customers is regarding what they buy. With high search relevance, a customer is served results that match exactly what they are seeking. Or, perhaps they’re also served results that might be unexpected, but equally appealing. In both cases, the customer is more likely to make a purchase (or two or three). Search relevance can be key to enticing a sale (and maybe future sales).

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The last way search relevance impacts customers is by preventing offending a customer. When a customer is offered the wrong search results, it can be worse than just confusing. The wrong results can be offensive. Here are some examples:

  • A woman searches for sweatshirts and is offered a series in pink or with the word “mom” on them. These search results are highly sexist. The woman may not wish to be a mother. Or, she may be facing infertility struggles. Pink is one way to express femininity, but it’s not the only one. This woman may find pink, frills, etc., a constricting expression of femininity.

  • A Star Trek fan is looking for a fan t-shirt. The search results include Star Wars, which is a very different series. In fact, many Star Trek fans actively dislike Star Wars because it’s not scientifically sound and is generally more widely known and popular. These results might irritate the potential customer enough to choose a different online store.

Consumers may be impacted by one or a combination of these factors. Resultantly, a brand might lose potential or current customers because of poor search relevance. These customers may also be offended enough to sway their friends and family not to shop with them either. These effects prove the power and ROI of strong LLM training, responsible AI, and human roles in AI.

Three Ways to Use AI Training Services to Enhance Search Relevance

The power of good search relevance is obvious, but how does a brand augment and enhance theirs? There are three steps we recommend:

Tactic 1: Get data collection services. Data collection AI services help build the strong sets of AI training data and insights needed to develop, refine, and test search algorithms. When trained on a comprehensive, diversified, updated spectrum of information, search engines can offer high-quality search relevance. Powerful data collection services include:

  • Diverse data sources

  • Fresh, updated information

  • Relevant user behavior

  • User context (location, device, search history, etc.)

  • Natural Language Processing capabilities (slang, synonyms, varied usage)

  • Entity recognition and relationship mapping (understanding the relationships between people, places, and products)

  • User feedback loops (generated over time, including ratings, reviews, user-generated content)

  • Long-tail queries (more specific, uncommon queries that may have a low search volume

  • Trends and patterns in user behavior

  • Assessment of content quality (determining usefulness and credibility based on engagement, backlinks, social shares, credibility, usefulness)

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  • #retail

Tactic 2: Find a vendor for data annotation. Data annotation labels data to help train and refine search engines’ algorithms. These services help train continuously, so search relevance stays strong for users. These are the areas in which human annotators help LLMs offer better search relevance:

  • Identifying a user’s intent in search queries

  • Evaluating search results for relevance and quality

  • Boosting natural language processing capabilities

  • Sharpening entity recognition, including people, places, organizations, etc.

  • Tailoring search results for a user’s behavior, preferences, and demographic

  • Flagging low-quality, irrelevant, and duplicative results

  • Training machine learning models on relevance of search results, keywords, relevant topics, etc.

Tactic 3: Work with AI training services experts. Working with AI training experts, like the ones at Lionbridge, is critical to providing customers and potential customers with the best search relevance. We’re already helping industry giants worldwide to audit and enhance their search relevance. We’re not just recent AI solutions experts. We’ve been working with AI’s predecessors for decades. We also developed our AI trust framework to ensure our services are consistently reliable, high quality, and transparent.

Get in touch

Are you ready to explore AI training services that help you offer exceptional search relevance to your customers? Want AI solutions with real ROI? We use innovative technology and our deep expertise to assist global industry giants who want to use AI to meet and exceed their content goals — faster. Let’s get in touch.

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AUTHORED BY
Samantha Keefe and Suzanne Tucker

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