Query: McDonald’s Zwijndrecht
The user has queried for a Chain Business with a Location Modifier which is the locality Zwijndrecht. So according to the guideline section 2.3.1 the user and viewport location should always be ignored when there is an explicit location.
Based on the official website (https://mcdonalds.be/nl/restaurants) we can see there is one McDonald’s in the locality Zwijndrecht which is rated Excellent (see figure below, locality borders of Zwijndrecht are shown in the right figure). Because there is only one result inside the requested locality results outside it should not be demoted too harsh. The closest results outside the requested locality gets a relevance rating of Good, further results would be demoted to Acceptable and Bad. In the figure below the closest results from the requested locality Zwijndrecht is McDonald’s Groenplaats (which would get a relevance rating of Good). As the difference in distance is very small in this case also the second closest result has Good as most appropriate rating, the third and fourth could be rated Acceptable.
Query: station Sint-Laureins
The user has queried for a category (station) inside a locality (Sint-Laureins). Based on an official train station map (https://bit.ly/3kkUlI6) we can however see that there are no train stations inside the requested locality Sint-Laureins (locality borders are shown left in the figure below). In this case the closest result outside the requested locality gets a relevance rating of Excellent, further results would be demoted to Good, Acceptable and Bad. In this example the station of Eeklo is the closest from Sint-Laureins and would be rated Excellent, the station of Waarschoot is the second closest and would be rated Good, further results Acceptable and Bad.
When evaluating user queries, it is important to keep in mind that they might contain some errors like spelling errors. When there is an obvious spelling error research of the query should be based on the corrected one. Below are a few examples of acceptable spell corrections Denhaize -> Delhaize
Tration -> station
Mecheleb -> Mechelen
Query: UZ Gent
Result: tram stop of UZ Gent
For a query UZ Gent the primary intent is the hospital UZ Gent (https://www.uzgent.be/), which would be rated Excellent. But beside that there can also be some secondary intents; there is for example also a tram stop named after the hospital, which is a secondary intent and should be demoted to Good for User Intent.
Query: IKEA
In the following example the query is for a chain business (IKEA), the viewport (blue rectangle) and user (yellow dot) are located between Aarschot and Tienen. The user is inside the fresh viewport so the user is the location intent (GL 2.3.2). Based on the official website we can however see that there are no results near the user (https://www.ikea.com/be/nl/stores/). The closest results are IKEA Zaventem and IKEA Hasselt which are both around 30 km from the user (two results inside the black circle in the figure below), which gets a relevance rating of Excellent. The second closest results are IKEA Wilkrijk, IKEA Liège (Luik) and IKEA Anderlecht (the three results just outside the black circle in the figure below), which are all around 45 km from the user. Despite the quite large distance of 45 km these results get still a relevance rating of Good because there are no results in the proximity of the user (closest is around 30 km). IKEA Heerlen (https://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/stores/heerlen/) is with the third closest results (around 73 km from user) and would be rated Acceptable. Further results would be rated Bad.
When the query is gibberish, and the result suggestion repeats the gibberish in the query and does not refer to anything specific, this doesn’t make sense and should be rated Bad. A few examples:
Query: Blommers
Result: Blommers, zoek in de buurt -> Bad
Query: weer (weather)
Result: weer, zoek in de buurt -> Bad
Query: azcfgh
Result: azcfgh, zoek in de buurt -> Bad