Rankings

[Thunderstone]

Is there a faq/page or listproc archive that describes how pages are
ranked? Is there a way to have titles=search display before text=search
as far as order?
Rich Wilbert

[Thunderstone]

There's currently no way to give the title more weight than the rest
of the document. We have been considering that possibility for a future
version.

Here's part of a another response related to ranking behavior.

Several people have asked about "seeding" the documents, so that particular
documents will occur first in the results. If two documents are determined
to have equal rank they will be displayed in the order they are in the
database, so you should walk the important documents first. The ranking
algorithm in the Webinator does not use frequency within a document in
determining the rank, so repeating a phrase many times will not help. This
also prevents people from "spoofing" the engine into returning their
page first.

The ranking algorithm does use proximity in calculating rank, and when
searching for several terms the whitespace, as well as the morpheme
processing may cause only 9 out of the 10 bars to light up, even if it
appears that the exact phrase is there.