GeoNames Forum

Hi,

are the results I recived from a web service ranked in some particular order, or are they just inline with the way they are being retrived from the database.

Phil

Hi Phil

There are many web services. For the search service the results are ranked by 'relevancy'.

Cheers

Marc

Ah right ok, yes Ido mean the search service, when you say relevancy what do you mean...word simularity etc....

Also if I search for a place name which is spelt slightly wrong, will the service use some sort of soundex algorithm to match on likeness..

Thanks for all the help, it is most appreciated.

Phil

The ranking relevancy is based on population, feature code and where the search term occurs. In the name? If yes ,how many other places do we find with this term?

For fuzzy search you have to use the specific parameter. The normal search parameter does not have any fuzzy search functionality.

Cheers

Marc

Very interesting, is there any documentation (technical documents, papers etc) about how it all works. If not no worries.

Phil

check out the apache lucene project or search for 'tf idf' (term frequency - inverse document frequency) with your favorite search engine. It is the same information retrieval technoloy all search engines are using.

Cheers

Marc