[pmwiki-users] [pmwikiusers] Search rankings/results

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 10:56:50AM -0500, GravyFace wrote:
> Can some explain how the search results are ordered?  I.e. does term
> frequency obtain a higher rank than the PageTitle?  Is there any
> ordering at all?  I'll add any "definitive" answer I receive from this
> email to the wiki;  could not find it in the SearchResults page or any
> of the other Searching category entries.

By default, search results tend to be ordered by page name.
This can be changed by using the order= parameter.

At the moment there's not a mechanism for weighting pages based
on term frequency.  It was a topic of discussion sometime last year,
but thus far I haven't been able to find a good ranking algorithm
to use (and I don't have any desire to be digging through the source
code of some other search engine application to find one :-).

At some point I fall back on my "PmWiki is not a search engine"
philosophy, and say that for advanced, fast full-text searches a
site will generally be better off setting up a real search engine 
and using it to index PmWiki, rather than us trying to re-invent 
the wheel inside of PmWiki.   (Indeed, an advantage of an external
search engine is that it would be able to index PDFs and other 
pages on a site that aren't wiki pages.)

I'm frequently on the lookout for a good search engine platform
that could be easily installed alongside PmWiki, but so far I
haven't been too impressed with the ones I've found.

Hope this helps,

Pm