Contextual Relevance

We all think we know what relevance means. It is the importance or relation of an object to a particular issue or paradigm. What is contextual relevance, however, especially with regards to the Web? This is about taking relevance to a whole new level.

The Merriam Webster dictionary has updated its definition of relevance to include “the ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user”

The idea of contextual relevance imparts multiple dimensions to the notion of relevance. This is of profound importance in the age of cyberspace and electronic semantics. One thing that may be relevant in one context, may not be relevant in another. In the case of the Web, this means that a web page that is relevant to one specific keyword may not be relevant to another keyword. While this may seem to be obviously true, it also implies that apparently unrelated pages may be relevant to a particular keyword or search, even if they appear to contain a lesser concentration of that particular keyword, or even if they provide less information about the topic that is apparently searched. Now you might be wondering how something containing less information could actually be more important?

It can - this is where contextual relevance comes in. We know that a good web page is about more than just keywords. It actually has to make sense and provide value to the user. However, just making sense or providing valuable information about those keywords is not enough. It must provide information about a subject that has a higher probability of satisfying user search requirement.

When a searcher looks for information about a particular search term, he/she is presented with a variety of different search results that contain his queried keywords in different concentrations and configurations. One result may contain a keyword x number of times, another result may contain the same keyword y number of times, etc.

However, web pages that contain the highest number of keywords in the search results may not necessarily be the most desirable from the searcher’s point of view. What the searcher needs is something that best serves their need, regardless of the amount of information that is relevant to their keywords. Sound confusing? Read on, it won’t be!

Contextual relevance is the relevance of a piece of information, such as a web page, to a particular issue or subject at hand. A search for a herbal supplement, milk thistle, for example, may result in a number of web pages about antioxidants. However, milk thistle will be more relevant in the context of liver disease than anything else. A good search engine will keep liver disease related search results near the top of the SERP in a search about milk thistle.

Another way to describe contextual relevance would be relative relevance. It all boils down to subjective intuition and the increased ability of search engines such as Google to attach intelligent semantic reasoning to keywords and associated web pages. Remember, keywords don’t matter if they are not relevant, and relevance won’t matter much without contextual relevance.