• Attempting to find the most useful documents

• Hard when most search terms are between one and three words!

• Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency

  • the number of times a search word appears in the document, divided by the number of times it appears in the collection.

• Weighting

  • adjusting the relevance ranking of a document according to many criteria

• Matching all words

  • adding relevance weight when all the search words are in a document.

• Position

  • adding weight when the matched word(s) are at the beginning

• Tag Checking

adding weight when the matched word(s) are in title, header, meta keyword or description tags.

• Link Tracking

  • adding weight when other pages link to that page.

• Click Tracking

  • adding weight when people click on result and stay for a while, subtracting it if they come right back (DirectHit).

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Thunderlizard Web Design World
Seattle, July 19, 1999

Avi Rappoport: Search Tools Consulting
www.searchtools.com