On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 07:06:58AM -0800, David Fishburn wrote:

> I can easily add meta tags to each of these documents including the number
> of subscriptions.
> <META NAME="subscription_count" CONTENT="25000" >
> 
> Based on this information I could change the default sorts from "swishrank"
> to "subscription_count".
> But rank is a complicated thing, based on search strings, proximity, title
> vs body and so on.
> 
> Those are all very valid criteria.
> Is there a way to combine all of this?

So are you asking if you can have a property that is used in the rank 
calculation?  That's been a common request.

There is not an existing feature like that.

It would mean that, after the normal rank calculations (which is done 
per-word, not per-document) when swish-e has the final list of documents 
to display, that an extra step would be required to go through that list 
and read the property file for each result and modify the rank.
 
(Currently, the property file is only accessed when the record needs to
be displayed (i.e. for just the page of results being displayed).  That 
process would add extra processing time since all the results would need 
to have their property table accessed.)

The ranks at that point in the search are "raw" -- the range isn't even
know at that point.  So I'm not sure how you would combine some value of
a property with that raw rank.

When the records are sorted the max raw rank value is found and then 
that max value is used to scale the rank from 0 to 1000 when printing 
the rank.


-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org