RiSearch Pro v.3.2 Manual

Results sorting

      Found documents can be sorted by relevance, document modification date, document size or returned in the order they appear in database. Each sorting type can be turned "On" or "Off" in configuration file. By default script will store all necessary information for all types of sorting. Please note, that many webservers do not return "Last modified" date for dynamic pages, and time of indexation will be used instead.

Relevance

      Relevance is an abstract measure of how well a document satisfies the user's query. RiSearch uses number of asked words as a base for relevance calculation. Each word occurrence in document gives one point to this document. Certain areas in document (such as title, headings, links, and words written in bold, italic) can have higher rating. This can be set up in configuration file. Then calculated points number is normalized according to the most frequent term for this document (so that longest document not necessary gets highest rating).

      Document rating for given term then can be modified according to number of documents with this term. In results most common words will have little effect in documents sorting.

      Document score also can be calculated using words position. In this case documents, where asked terms appear together, will get higher rating. This feature can be turned "On" in configuration file. But please note, that it will increase index size by factor 2-3. And also it will slow down search, especially for very big sites.

Configuration parameters

1.  allow_sort_by_rating => 1,  - turns ON the page rating calculation. Additionally, you may sort the documents by last_modified date and size (allow_sort_by_date, allow_sort_by_size).

2.  weight_title => 5,  - you may control the weight of the word depending on it's position on page. Each occurrence of word increases the word rating by 1. You may choose another weight for words occurred in page TITLE, heading, metatags, and links to other pages...

3.  word_freq => 1,  - turns ON the document score normalization according to word frequency (common word will get lower rating). Can be turned OFF and ON without site reindexing.

4.  word_dist => 1,  - turns ON the document score calculation using words distance information.

5.  weight_dist => 10,  - this parameter defines weight change for documents where asked words appear together. It is used only during search and can be modified to get better relevance without site reindexing.

      Use additional parameter "&o=R" in query string to get results in reverse order.