Trip’s search is sensitive! If a user searches for ‘measles’ and the term is mentioned one time in a document of over 100,000 words, it is still returned as a result. This is not normally an issue if there are lots of results. However, if you select a facet with relatively few results (e.g. UK guidelines) then these very low relevancy results appear.

A real example, if you do a search for measles and go into European guidelines, there are 12 results. These are results 7-12:

  • ESPEN expert statements and practical guidance for nutritional management of individuals with sars-cov-2 infection
  • Autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation and other cellular therapy in multiple sclerosis and immune-mediated neurological diseases
  • Hepatitis E Virus Infection
  • Autoimmune Hepatitis
  • Guideline on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Sclerosing Diseases of the Skin
  • ECCO-ESGAR Guideline for Diagnostic Assessment in IBD Part 1: Initial diagnosis, monitoring of known IBD, detection of complications

Result 7, ESPEN expert statements and practical guidance for nutritional management of individuals with sars-cov-2 infection mentions measles 4 times in over 8,000 words. To us, this article is not about measles!

This issue has been frustrating us, and some of our users, for years. But we’ve now made a big step forward in removing low relevancy results from Trip. This feature has been released today – for Pro users only. Repeating the search for measles we now get 6,681 results overall and 4 European guidelines, previously it was 7,764 results and 12 European guidelines.

Overall, there was a 14% reduction in total results, but in European guidelines the reduction was nearly 67%. This is to be expected as guidelines are typically much longer documents and therefore have more scope for mentions of low relevancy terms.

And, if you don’t like this you can revert to the full results by a link at the foot of the results page:

I suspect this feature will not be noticed by many but it should dramatically change the quality of results in some situations. I am delighted to see this feature, it has bothered me for many years.