What the playground shows

The playground, in your dashboard, is a query box over your real, live index — the same results your widget would show, plus a panel explaining the ranking.

The query box

Type a query and results update as you type, exactly as the widget would show them: grouped by page with a breadcrumb, highlighted, stale-while-revalidate. There is nothing sandboxed about it — the playground is the same search your visitors run.

"Why this rank"

Select any two results and the playground lays out both hits' full ranking vectors side by side, tier by tier: pins, words matched, typos, proximity, attribute, exactness, custom ranking, bm25. The tier that actually decided the order between the two is marked, so you can see at a glance whether one result won on an exact title match, a shorter proximity, or just a custom recency rule.

This is the fastest way to answer "why is the wrong page first?" — usually the answer is one specific tier, not a mystery in a black-box score.

Zero-result queries

When a query in the playground returns nothing, you get the same fix-list actions the dashboard's Analytics tab surfaces for real zero-result queries from your visitors:

• Add a synonym — if the query means the same as an existing page's wording.
• Pin a result — if one page should always answer this query.
• Mark as a missing page — if nothing on your site actually answers it yet, which flags it as a content gap rather than a relevance problem.

Typing CJK queries

The playground behaves the same for a partial CJK query as it does live: type 清华 and you will see it land on 清华大学 through a bigram match well before the word is complete, with the matched fragment highlighted inside the word. It is the fastest way to demonstrate the CJK recall floor described in CJK to a teammate.

What it does not do

The playground does not write anything back to your index and does not affect analytics — running a query here never counts as a real visitor search, and does not appear in Reading analytics.