A signal is a recorded event related to one or more documents in a collection. Signals can record any kind of event that is useful to your organization. Click signals are the most common type of signals as this is the most common action a user takes with an item. In addition, other signal types can be defined, such as “addToCart”, “purchase”, and so on. The default storage duration for signals is 90 days. To change this to a different lenght of time, contact Lucidworks. Using a sufficiently large collection of signals, Managed Fusion can automatically generate recommendations such as these:
  • Based on the user’s search query, which items are most likely to interest them?
  • Based on the user’s similarity to other users, which additional items are likely to interest them?
Signals are indexed in a secondary collection which is linked to the primary collection by the naming convention <primarycollectionname>_signals. So, if your main collection is named products, the associated signals collection is named products_signals. The signals collection is created automatically when signals are enabled for the primary collection. Signals are enabled by default whenever a new collection is created. Signals are indexed just like ordinary documents. The signals collection can be searched like any other collection, for example by using the Query Workbench with the signals collection selected. See signals types and structure for more information.

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The cold start problem

The “cold start” problem means it is hard to personalize the search experience when insufficient signals have been aggregated. For example, it is hard to offer recommendations to users who have never visited before, or for queries that have never been issued before, or for items that have been recently introduced into the system. Managed Fusion provides solutions for this problem using its query pipelines. A query pipeline that includes stages for blocking, boosting, or recommending based on signals can also include stages that provide fallbacks. In the case where there is not enough data to provide specialized blocking, boosting, or recommendations, the pipeline can return a simpler set of search results using Solr’s normal relevancy calculation. A common solution to the cold start problem is to sort or boost on a certain field to provide pseudo-recommendations when more specific recommendations are not available. For example, you can sort on the sales_rank field to recommend the most popular products, or boost on the date_added field to recommend the newest items.

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Indexing or importing Signals

Normally, signals are indexed as streaming data during the natural activity of users. See Signals for details. For more information, see Parallel Bulk Loader.

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Additional resources

LucidAcademyLucidworks offers free training to help you get started.The Course for Fusion Signals focuses on what signals are and how important they are for increasing search relevance:
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Visit the LucidAcademy to see the full training catalog.