In an embodiment, the disclosed technologies are capable of creating and storing a digital repository capable of storing digital work items; receiving a query; determining historical alpha values and historical beta values for each of at least two candidate search algorithms; for each of the at least two candidate search algorithms, generating a beta distribution using the historical alpha values and the historical beta values as parameters; for each of the at least two candidate search algorithms, computing, using values sampled from the beta distribution, a score that indicates a likelihood of the candidate search algorithm producing a search result that satisfies a relevance criterion; selecting, from the at least two candidate search algorithms, an algorithm that has a score that satisfies a selection criterion; and executing the query using the selected algorithm.