On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 08:54:14AM -0700, Sven Schupp wrote:

> I'm a bit confused about the ranking.
> Do I have any influence on the score?
> Let's assume I have in some of my files a special Meta-tag. If a site 
> contains this special Meta-tag, i'd like to increase the ranking by 100 
> pts. Is this possible in any way?
> 
> I found the "MetaNamesRank"-directive, but it's not implemented yet.

It's implemented in the current dev version which can be downloaded from the 
"swish-daily" page off the web site.

Now, how well it works needs to be tested.  I would recommend looking at 
the C code in src/rank.c.  There's a bunch of variables that need to be 
combined to come up with a word's rank, and how well that is done is 
questionable and needs review.  Then there's the issue of combining 
results in boolean AND and OR searches -- and phrases.

I was indexing the various sites at Apache.org just a week or so ago, and 
the ranking was not working that well -- mostly what was happening was very 
large files were overpowering the results (I was compare the results from 
swish-e with the results searching google.)  I added a very simple hack of 
just only considering the first 100 word hits (not first words) in each 
document to keep the huge documents ranking highest.  This helped quite a 
bit.  But it's not a well thought out ranking system.

If you look at the swish-e list archives you will see a number of posts
discussing ranking lately.


-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org