Quality Classification vs. Relevance Scoring in search engines

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SEOs should know the difference between relevance scoring and quality classification. Relevance scoring is an evaluation of a document that is always directly related to the search queries and it is using points to validate a document. Quality classifiers are using classes or categories for evaluating a document according to a topic, context … Also a classifier can be used to classify domains, website areas, source entities or a query itself.

E-E-A-T is Google’s quality classifier concept, which summarizes the ratings of different quality classifiers. This makes it all the more important to know the differences.

Scorer vs. Classifier

In information retrieval (IR), Scorer and Classifier serve different roles, though both contribute to ranking and decision-making in search and recommendation systems.

Scorers award individual scores per content in direct relation to the search query and always require a direct comparison with at least one other content for the ranking. The scores of the content can then be compared with each other in pairs or lists according to the learning-to-rank methodology and ranked. You can find out more about learning-to-rank (LTR) in this article: https://www.kopp-online-marketing.com/learning-to-rank-ltr-a-comprehensive-introduction

Classifiers can be used pointwise, i.e. independently of the other content or search queries. As a rule, threshold values are used here to separate classes from one another. This makes them more scalable and resource-saving when applied to large amounts of content. For example, a pre-qualification for the documents to be scored later can be applied inititially to large corpuses. In addition, a lot of content can also be classified by topic or quality classes, for example.

Helpful content for example is according to Google a classifier.

Key Differences

Feature	Scorer	Classifier
Output	Relevance score (continuous)	Category label (discrete)
Purpose	Rank documents by relevance	Categorize queries/documents
Models Used	BM25, LTR, Neural rankers	SVM, Decision Trees, BERT
Use Case	Search ranking	Spam detection, topic classification

Scorer

A Scorer is responsible for assigning a numerical score to documents based on their relevance to a given query.
It typically uses features like term frequency (TF), inverse document frequency (IDF), BM25, neural embeddings, and learning-to-rank models.
The output of a scorer is a ranking of documents, where higher-scoring documents are more relevant.
Common approaches:
- Traditional IR models: BM25, TF-IDF, language models
- Neural ranking models: BERT-based rankers, Siamese networks
- Learning-to-Rank (LTR): Gradient Boosting Trees (GBMs), neural ranking models

📌 Example: A BM25 Scorer assigns a score to each document based on query-term matching.

Classifier

A Classifier is responsible for assigning a category or label to a document or query.
It is usually used in categorization tasks, such as:
- Spam detection (spam vs. non-spam)
- Query intent classification (navigational, informational, transactional)
- Document genre classification (news, blog, research paper)
It typically uses machine learning models like decision trees, SVMs, deep learning (BERT, CNNs).
The output of a classifier is a discrete label or class, rather than a ranking score.

📌 Example: A Neural Classifier predicts whether a document belongs to “Sports” or “Politics.”

Scoring Algorithms in Information Retrieval

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About Olaf Kopp

Olaf Kopp is Co-Founder, Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO) and Head of SEO & Content at Aufgesang GmbH. He is an internationally recognized industry expert in semantic SEO, E-E-A-T, LLMO, AI- and modern search engine technology, content marketing and customer journey management. As an author, Olaf Kopp writes for national and international magazines such as Search Engine Land, t3n, Website Boosting, Hubspot, Sistrix, Oncrawl, Searchmetrics, Upload … . In 2022 he was Top contributor for Search Engine Land. His blog is one of the most famous online marketing blogs in Germany. In addition, Olaf Kopp is a speaker for SEO and content marketing SMX, SERP Conf., CMCx, OMT, OMX, Campixx...