Amazon iconAmazonAug 31, 2026 ~7 min source read

Measuring and improving search quality with Amazon OpenSearch Service

How to capture user behavior signals with the UBI schema, ingest them into Amazon OpenSearch Service, and convert those signals into relevance judgments with Search Relevance Workbench so you can measure and validate search-result quality.

Measuring and improving search quality with Amazon OpenSearch Service

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Useful takeaways from this story.

Collect query and event data using the UBI open schema so every search and user action is linkable via query_id.

Record zero-result queries and absolute positions for paginated results to capture gaps like vocabulary mismatches or long-tail failures.

The useful part

It's the lack of deliberate signal collection, measurement, and a feedback loop to act on it. Together, UBI and SRW give you a repeatable framework: collect signals, turn them into relevance judgments, and validate every change before it ships. In this post, we show you how to capture UBI data on an Amazon OpenSearch Service domain and use those signals to evaluate search quality.

How it works

  • We build the foundation here, and Part 2 covers automating the workflow end to end.
  • You can't improve what you can't measure Consider a shopper searching for "handbag" on an ecommerce site.
  • The catalog has 16 products (tote bags, duffel bags, laptop bags), but every title only says "bag." The search returns zero results.
  • Your server log recorded that first query as a clean sub-second response: no error, no alert, no signal.
  • That customer hit a vocabulary gap between how they search and how you write your catalog.

What to take from it

The application creates the ID when it runs a search and stamps it on every subsequent event the user produces, until the user issues a new search or the session ends. opensearch: hosts: ["https:// "] aws: serverless: false region: sts_role_arn: index_type: custom index: ubi_events. Optionally, both pipelines archive records to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Example or evidence

  • Zoom out and apply this lens to misspelled queries, poor handling of long-tail searches, and abandoned sessions.
  • Users select the first result far more than the fifth, regardless of relevance, so raw click counts reflect where results appeared, not whether they deserved to be there.
  • Collecting UBI data on Amazon OpenSearch Service Behavioral data (what results ranked, what users saw, what they selected) exists only in the application layer.
  • Users interact with the results, viewing and selecting documents.

Details worth keeping

When search feels broken, the culprit is rarely the engine. You can close this gap on Amazon OpenSearch Service using User Behavior Insights (UBI), an open schema standard for capturing search behavior, and Search Relevance Workbench (SRW), a toolkit for measuring and evaluating search quality. Your application generates the UBI-formatted records.

Related coverage

  • Amazon: Learn how to observe and evaluate production AI agents by combining an agent running on AWS with OpenSearch Agent Health.
  • Amazon: Learn how to migrate an Amazon CloudSearch domain to Amazon OpenSearch Serverless: assess your configuration, create a collection with explicit index mappings, convert your documents and queries to the...
  • Amazon: NarrateAI delivers production-ready LLM quality assurance on Amazon Bedrock.
  • Amazon: Comparing models on dollars per million tokens misses what production workloads actually pay for: outcomes.
  • Itsfoss: The 2026 Open Data Infrastructure Report finds 62% of current users already run OpenSearch for AI workloads.

More context around this story.

OSPAR 2026 report now available with 167 services in scope
Amazon iconAmazonSep 4, 2026

OSPAR 2026 report now available with 167 services in scope

We’re pleased to confirm the successful completion of our annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outsourced Service Provider’s Audit Report (OSPAR) assessment on July 29, 2026, in line with the OSPAR version 2.0 framework. The Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) established the Guidelines on Control Objectives and Proced

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