Warwick Search ranking factors
Several factors affect ranking in relation to a particular search query. A document that contains more of the query's terms has a higher score than another document with fewer matching query terms.
For every term in a query:
- Documents with more occurrences of a given term have higher scores than those with fewer occurrences.
- Rarer terms (in all documents) contribute more to the total score than common terms. For example, in the query Warwick compiler, the term Warwick has less effect on a result than compiler.
Also, where you place a term in a SiteBuilder page affects results:
- Content on the right-hand side counts half as much as centre content.
- Terms in the page heading score much higher.
- Terms formatted as heading 2 through 6 score higher.
- Site roots score much higher. For example, a page located at
warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/med/
scores higher thanwarwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/med/example/
, even ifexample/
has the same content.
For more technical information about how document scoring works, see the Lucene documentation.
Related help articles
Warwick Search
- Search for past exam papers
- Search for people at Warwick
- Improve a SiteBuilder page's rank in search engine results
- Add a live search box to a SiteBuilder page
- Refine your search
- Ranking factors
- Content types indexed by Warwick Search
- Remove pages or files from search results
- RSS and JSON feeds of search results
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