Ranking the Search Results

[Anon]

I am in the process of building a large database site. I am currently building the search page. If a person is doing a general search, what would be the best way to rank the results so that the most relevant results are at the top of the list?

Need more info? Let me know.

[rrijnders]

I am sure there are many different methods of determining relevance of search results, but I usually just assign points to the hits I get during the search:

If the search word shows up in the URL: 15 points
If the search word shows up in between <TITLE></TITLE>: 10 points
If the search word shows up in the meta "description": 5 points
If the search word shows up in the meta "keywords": 5 points
Each time the word shows up in the body: 1 point

I am sure there are much more scientific ways of doing it, but I have been doing it this way on small sites (< 1000 pages) since my "mosaic' days.

-- Rich

[Anon]

I didn't explain myself very clearly. One of the issues, none of the pages are static. All of them are generated dynamically from a MySQL database. I must be honest, I am not an expert at SQL yet, so I am not sure if there would be a way to rank the result by a similar formula as was previously mentioned.

Example:
If the word appears in the "name" field it has a 10x weight

If it appears in the "keywords" field it has a 5x weight

etc...