Please explain "Ranked" results...

Are they ranked by places we'd never even dream of looking?

There are other places where I wonder the same thing about the hits we get presented.

Ranking is done with standard information retrieval algorithms. They find articles that have the most similarity to your query. So if your query is:

red, blue, green

and the article is

red, blue, green

You get a 100% match. (High rank.)

If the article is:

red, blue

you get a 66% match.

If the article is:

red white blue white green white

you get a 50% match.

A side effect of this standard system is that short articles that are similar to your query get high ranks. And a short article gets preferred over a long one (since long ones have more non-query words). There are attempts to "normalize for length", but on single term queries -- and a Bible verse is a single term -- it's hard to overcome the effect. In this case the lectionary article is very tiny, since the Bible text itself is inserted dynamically (so you can select the version of your choice). To the indexer, it's just an article with 3 or 4 BIble verses. That makes a query for one of those Bible verses a 25% match, which ranks much higher than the 0.002% match it might be in a much larger article.

And arguably, it is a good match. That article only has four things in it, and your search was for one of those four things. That's a better match to your query than a big long commentary article that has hundreds of unrelated words in it.

Now you and I know that's not a great match. But the system doesn't. And it doesn't know what would be a better match, since it can't read your mind. I can't even read your mind, :-). I'm not sure why you're searching for Luke 1:1-4. Are you looking to find the text of it? (In which case the lectionary page isn't so bad.) Or are you looking for a commentary on it?  Or are you looking into Theophilus? Or into book introductions in general? Or for a contrast in Luke's framing vs. the other gospels?

What would you expect as the first hit? (Honest question, so we can try to tune the system in the future.)

Generally, you'll get better results the more terms you provide. Even one more term helps; I tried:

<bible ~ "luke 1:1-4"> theophilus

and got a much more useful journal article contrasting Luke 1:1-4 and Acts 1:1-3. Seems pretty relevant to my query.

Ideally, we're like Google. (Which also returns a "short page" featuring the text "Luke 1:1-4" -- in this case, from a Bible that has just the reference and the text.) A "bag of words" query works best.

Hope this helps!

 

Thanks Bob.  Makes sense about what is happening and maybe how to think about how we might refine our searchs a little more.