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Ranking Favorite Food Records in Database Search Results

TLDR Julian asked for best practices to rank favorite food records in search results. John suggested using _eval. Jason recommended adding a favorited_by_user_ids array field to each record.

3mo

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Jun 20, 2023 (3 months ago)

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Julian

01:59 PM

Scenario pitch: I have a db of food records. Users can mark single records as favorites. The favorite state should be considered on the search ranking.

Example: User searches for "cream". The desired outcome would be:
1. "Heavy Cream (14% fat)" (<--- marked as favorite)
2. "Cream"
3. "Best cream"

Token position is relevant (2 matches before 3) and records marked as favorite should be on top if at least matched partially (prefix or infix).

Any ideas for best practices to achieve this? 🙏

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John

03:20 PM

One way of accomplishing this is by using _eval. I created a collection with

[
    {"title": "Heavy Cream", "product_id": "1"},
    {"title": "Cream", "product_id": "2"},
    {"title": "Best Cream", "product_id": "3"},
    {"title": "Wow I love this cream", "product_id": "4"},
]

which normally would give

Cream
Wow I love this cream
Best Cream
Heavy Cream

for "cream", but if you set

"sort_by": "_eval(product_id:[1,4]):desc,_text_match:desc"

you get

Wow I love this cream <- favorite
Heavy Cream <- favorite
Cream
Best Cream

There could be some performance costs if the user has a lot of favorites, but in my experience with large filters it hasn't been a problem even with many hundreds of items.

Note that this can result in worse matches marked as favorite coming before better matches, but I don't think it'll be much of a problem in practice (most of the time the entire candidate set will be quite good)

Julian

03:58 PM

Nice, I will give this a try. Thank you, appreciated!

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Jason

04:11 PM

Nice, that’s a great use of optional filtering John! Thank you for sharing.

04:13

Jason

04:13 PM

Extending on your idea, another thing that could be done is adding an array field called say favorited_by_user_ids to each record, and store which users have favorited each product.

Then you could do something like this:

"sort_by": "_eval(favorited_by_user_ids:=<CURRENT_USERS_ID>):desc,_text_match:desc"

04:14

Jason

04:14 PM

This way you don’t have to query your DB to get the list of user favorites, and can keep the search fully isolated to just Typesense

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