Ranking Signals and Their Trade-offs
How recency, authority, and engagement blend — and what to test first
You'll be able to
- Describe, at a conceptual level, the families of signals that shape ranking
- Decide which single signal to test first when a relevant result ranks too low
Read first
Day 3 Lab
- Find a query where a document you trust ranks lower than it should.
- Form a hypothesis about which signal family is holding it back — recency, authority, or engagement.
- Test one signal at a time: tighten a date bound, or compare against a more-linked authoritative doc.
- Observe whether the rank moves; record the change, not an assumed weight.
- Conclude which signal mattered most for this query — and note that the answer can differ per query.
Working Example: Reasoning About Signals Without Guessing Weights
Ranking blends several signal families. The exact weightings are internal to Glean and not published, so this is a conceptual model for deciding what to test first — not a formula. Verified against retrieval_basics.
Signal family What it tends to favor A fair test you can run
------------- ----------------------------- -----------------------------
recency newer documents add after: and see if rank rises
authority well-connected / canonical docs compare a linked-from-many doc
engagement docs people actually open check a frequently-opened peer
Honest framing:
- These families BLEND; you can't read off exact weights from the outside.
- The graph relates entities and signals — it does not, by itself, decide
one fixed ranking; treat ranking as observed behavior you probe, not a dial.
- Test ONE signal per change so the rank movement is interpretable.Check for understanding
A known-good doc ranks at #8. Which signal would you check first, and how would you test it without guessing weights?
Check yourself
1. When stacking operators on a 500-result query, how do you know which constraint did the real work?
2. You're exploring an unfamiliar result set and don't yet know which apps have hits. What's the better tool?
3. A trusted document ranks at #8. What's the honest way to investigate the ranking?
4. What three things must a written search recipe include so a teammate reproduces your exact result set?
5. Which question best justifies Glean's multi-step thinking mode over a quick answer?
In 10 seconds
“Ranking blends recency, authority, and engagement — but nobody outside Glean knows the exact weights. So don't guess them. Change one signal, watch the rank move, and let the result set teach you.”
Repeatable Search Recipes