Is there a way to ensure that certain pages come up much higher in the results page than others? We want 2 specific pages to be at the top of the list anytime there's a match with them.
Short of doing a rather inefficient thing like doing the query against just those 2 pages first, then the rest of the pages, you would need a full Texis license to gain that level of control over the database.
All other things being equal with respect to a set of query results, page insertion order will govern the order of the returned documents. ie: first crawled, first returned. The other thing you can do is place meta-keywords within the documents that will bias them higher for certain query terms.
If you are trying to implement something like we did at GOTO.com though, you will have to use a full Texis version.