Relevance Ranking controls the order in which search results are displayed to the end user of an Oracle Commerce application.
Application users are often unwilling to page through large result sets. For this reason, you need to be able to display the more important search results before the less important results. The Relevance Ranking feature enables you to do this.
Relevance ranking can control the order in which results from both
record search and dimension search queries are displayed. However, while
relevance ranking for record search can be configured with Developer Studio,
relevance ranking for dimension search cannot. (You assign relevance ranking
for dimension search through the
RELRANK_STRATEGY
attribute of
dimsearch_config.xml
, or at query time by specifying
the
Dx
and
Dk
parameters of the
UrlENEQuery
.)
The importance of a search result is generally an application-specific concept. The Relevance Ranking feature provides a flexible, configurable set of result ranking modules. These modules can be used in combinations (called ranking strategies) to produce a wide range of relevance ranking effects. Because Relevance Ranking is a complex and powerful feature, Oracle Commerce provides recommended strategies that you can use as a point of departure for further development. For details, see Recommended strategies.