Troubleshooting document search results

This section can help you fix issues in your Amazon Kendra search results.

My search results are not relevant to my search query

If your search results seem irrelevant, it might be for the following reasons:

• Results with LOW confidence are included in the results. You can filter out results with LOW confidence by using the QueryResultItem's ScoreAttributes field to exclude any result with a value of LOW. Amazon Kendra assigns each result a confidence bucket value of either VERY_HIGH, HIGH, MEDIUM and LOW. These values indicate the level of confidence that a result is relevant to a query. Also, irrespective of confidence buckets, Amazon Kendra returns three types of results in the following order: ANSWER (suggested answer excerpt), QUESTION_ANSWER (FAQ) and DOCUMENT (document excerpt). Therefore, it is possible for a LOW confidence QUESTION_ANSWER result to be positioned above a VERY_HIGH confidence DOCUMENT result. However, it isn't always necessarily true that LOW confidence QUESTION_ANSWER is a better result than the VERY_HIGH confidence DOCUMENT.

• Certain metadata fields or attributes are boosted to a very high value, affecting the ranking of results. Amazon Kendra searches your index using multiple parameters such as document title, text, date, and custom text fields or attributes. You can experiment with different boosting values to get the best results across all queries. You can also use dynamic relevance tuning at the query level to use different boosting values for each query.

• Your users are using specialized terms when they query for information and there's no custom synonyms set up for your index to handle these specialized terms. For more details on how and when to use synonyms, see Adding custom synonyms to an index.

Why do I only see 100 results?

Amazon Kendra returns the total count of relevant documents. The top 100 are returned per query by default. The results are paginated. You can use PageNumber to access different pages.

You can configure Amazon Kendra to return up to 1,000 documents or search results per query, with up to 100 results per page. To return more than 100 results, you can request this by contacting Quotas Support. Increasing the number of search results could impact latency.

Why are documents that I expect to see missing?

Amazon Kendra supports access control lists (ACLs) based on user and groups. Amazon Kendra ingests ACL policies via connectors. If an index does not configure an ACL, only documents matching the attribute filter for user and group will be shown. If a user or group attribute filter is provided, documents without an ACL will not be shown.

If you are using token-based access control, documents without an ACL policy and documents that match the user and groups will be shown.

Why do I see documents that have an ACL policy?

If an index does not configure an access control policy, then user and groups can be provided by the filter. If no user and group filter is applied, then all related documents will be returned. Any ACL policy will be ignored.