4.2 Beta: Ranked search results: Any chance of improvement in the algorithm?

I'm usually underwhelmed by the ranking of search hits. In particular when there are results which have the search term as a keyword in the title, I would like to see those get higher priority than articles that happen to mention the search term more times. I mean seriously, a mention of him in "Secondary Sources" being ranked higher than his main entries in two biographical dictionaries, including that which the "Secondary Sources" entry came from? In this particular instance, the main Berkouwer entry in "Handbook of Evangelical Theologians" should be listed first, with the next six entries (which are sub-sections of that main entry) coming after it.

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Comments

Robert Pavich

I agree....I would think that this could be massaged to provide more relevance in the hits....

Paul M

I agree Rosie, I often find that the most relevant search results appear further down the search results.

Mark Barnes

I agree, Rosie. There are two issues that I can see.

As you point out, results in titles don't seem to be ranked higher than results elsewhere.
Ranking appears to be based on the frequency of the results in the articles (something like number of results / number of words in article). However:
- This seems to unfairly promote very short articles (such as 'secondary sources' in your example) and penalise long ones which may be more in depth.
- Some articles are split into invisible segments for performance reasons, which means they appear multiple times in the search results, and their ranking is consequently skewed (such as 'Berkouwer, Gerrit Cornelis' in your example).
- Sub-articles are treated as separate articles, not as children of the parent. So, in your example, all the first five entries are actually sub-sections of one major article. It would be better if they were grouped in some way to reflect this, or at least higher-level articles inheriting some of the ranking of lower level articles.