Solving the issue of Inconsistent search results and “disappearing” articles on Summon
We often find that identical searches performed on consecutive days come up with different numbers of results, and articles found when doing the search on one day don’t appear when doing the search on another day. The explanation we have been given is that it depends which server you hit with your search, but shouldn't the contents of each server be identical? This is especially problematic if you are running a workshop where students are completing a worksheet where they are asked to give numbers of results. The missing content is obviously an issue if you find something useful one day and it has gone the next.
The explanation that was given to you and that is described in this Idea Exchange entry regarding why results may change in Summon is unfortunately incomplete. Discrepancies between total counts for search results can be due to a variety of factors, including:
- Time outs on individual servers: the Central Discovery Index sits on hundreds of servers, each returning results. A slow connection may result in two different queries having a result count that is one or two, or even hundreds different. This can be caused by a variety of connections between the index and the end user, and while it can be minimized, it cannot be eliminated. This would account for most of your fluctuations that occur in side by side searches.
- Changes in available records or content: institutions will update their subscriptions or change their catalog records, which can result in one particular resource switching from available to not.
- Changes in the content itself. If metadata is added or removed from records as they are updated, their relevance for a specific query can also be affected.
We continue to work on programmatic solutions to reduce or eliminate these issues as we can. Providing specific examples to our support team can help us determine other specific solutions we can try.
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Michael Wiesen commented
This is also one our number one priority concern with the summon index. We are experiencing this issue for a long time and have made a ticket regarding this more than once.
Since we are loading our local data to the index and use summon as the only search instrument for our users this issue, from our point of view, cant be addressed enough.