During query processing, ATG Search computes the relevance of matched documents and sentences to the query. Each term is assigned a weight ranging from 0 to 100. A 0 weight means no content value, and 100 means maximum content value.
Typically, terms that appear in many documents have low content value and therefore low weight. Because such terms appear in many documents, they do not contribute much information to determine how relevant a document is to the query. In contrast, terms that appear in a few documents have high content value and therefore high weight. These term weights can be summed to compute the weight of each sentence, the weight of each document or index item, and the weight of the input query.
Note: ATG Search allows users to override the computed weight of a term, as described in the Custom Terminology section.
The computation of the results’ relevance takes into account the term weights of the query, the sentences and the documents. For example, a query with one low-weighted and one high-weighted term will retrieve results that include either or both terms. The computed relevancy of these results will reflect a preference to retrieve results with both terms, since the sum of the matching weights will be higher, plus a preference to favor results that contain the high weighted term, since it is of higher content value.
