About the relevance ranking feature

Relevance ranking allows you to control the order in which search results are displayed to the end user of a front-end application powered by the Oracle Endeca Server.

Typically, the relevance ranking feature is used to ensure that the most important search results are displayed earliest to the user, because users of search-oriented information retrieval systems are often unwilling to page through large result sets.

Relevance ranking can be used to independently control the result ordering for both record search and value search queries. You can establish a system-default relevance ranking for both record search and value search. In addition, you can assign relevance ranking on a per-query basis for both search types.

The importance of a search result is generally an application-specific concept. Thus, the relevance ranking feature provides a flexible, configurable set of result ranking modules. These modules can be used in combinations (called relevance ranking strategies) to produce a wide range of relevance ranking effects. Results are scored according to the order of ranking modules within the strategy.

Note: Because relevance ranking is a complex and powerful feature, this documentation provides recommended strategies that you can use as a point of departure for further development. For details, see the "Recommended strategies" topic in this section.