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Question Regarding Wikipedia Fulltext Search Rankings  XML
Forum Index -> FAQ - frequently asked questions
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nic



Joined: 13/10/2006 04:04:02
Messages: 1
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Hi,
Can you tell how you work out the relevancy rankings for queries to your Wikipedia Fulltext Search.
For example, given the query "hollywood": http://ws.geonames.org/wikipediaSearch?q=hollywood&maxRows=10
Here are the top four geonames.org ranked wikipedia articles:
- West Hollywood, California
- Los Angeles, California
- Lagos
- Hollywood, Los Angeles, California

If I go to the Wikipedia website do a similar search (clicking SEARCH rather than GO) and ignore results that aren't articles about specific place names, then I get the following ranked list:
- Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
- West Hollywood, California
- Hollywood, Portland, Oregon
- Hollywood, Florida

I know how search engines work - documents are ranked with respect to the frequency of the query term. I'm just wondering why your rankings are different to Wikipedia's. Are you calculating word frequency from the full wikipedia article or just a summary? Are you giving more weight to a query term if it occurs in the title of that wiki article?

Just curious...
Thanks
marc



Joined: 08/12/2005 07:39:47
Messages: 4412
Offline

Hi Nic

The full text search is over the full article text and the title is boosted by a factor of 10. After your posting I think it will be better to increase the title boost.

Regards

Marc

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