What’s a query pipeline?

This is for:

Developer System Administrator

In your Coveo organization, a query pipeline is an alternate set of rules or model associations that can be defined to modify queries. You can define query pipelines from the Coveo Administration Console (see Manage query pipelines).

You can take advantage of query pipelines when you have more than one search interface with distinct users and purposes and want to apply different rules or models for each.

Example

Your customers and partners use your community portal to self-serve and find relevant information, while your support agents access an internal service portal to find relevant public and private items. You can create a separate pipeline for each portal, defining appropriate rules for each search interface audience.

You can also use query pipeline A/B testing to evaluate rule or model changes on a part of the users.

Query pipeline rules can define:

  • Search terms

  • Result rankings

    • Featured results - items appearing at the top of search results when the query meets a specific condition.

    • Ranking expressions - modifying the order of results matching specified expressions and conditions.

  • Groups & campaigns - grouping sets of result ranking rules that apply for specific contexts, audiences, or periods of time.

  • Advanced query pipeline rules

    • Filters - adding hidden query expressions to all queries that go through the query pipeline.

    • Query parameters - overriding search parameter values for every query that goes through the query pipeline.

    • Ranking weights - establishing the impact of ranking factors when establishing the order of results.

    • Triggers - establishing actions to be performed in the user search interface following an event when a condition is met.

Some rules can be applied on the query before it’s sent to the index (like thesaurus and stop words), while others are applied on the results returned by the index before they’re sent back to the search interface (like featured results and ranking rules).

Query pipeline associated models can define:

See Manage models.

Order of execution

The following diagram illustrates the overall order of execution of query pipeline features:

order of pipeline execution

What’s next?

Understand how to create and use a query pipeline (see Deploy a query pipeline).