Configure ranking
What is relevance?
Relevance is the ordering of search results where a ranking algorithm is used to put the results in an order with the most important (or relevant) results returned first.
There are many factors that can be used to determine relevance and these factors will change from site to site. For example, some factors that might be used to determine relevance include:
-
how many times the search keywords exist in the content
-
how recent the document is
-
where the search keywords appear within the documnent
-
how many other documents link to the document
-
where the document sits in a website’s structure
Funnelback’s default algorithm has been setup to provide a good balance that works well with most indexes, so you should get good results without any adjustments. However, Funnelback also provides you with the ability to tune and tweak the algorithm so that you can optimize it for your content.
What would you like to do?
-
Improve your search result relevance without altering the weightings in the ranking algorithm
There are many factors that affect the quality of ranking for a search which do not involve adjustments to the weightings used by Funnelback’s ranking algorithm. This guide provides a general overview of what should be considered when attempting to improve search result rankings. You should try this out before tweaking the algorithm.
-
Optimize the ranking algorithm
Use the tuning tool to optimize the ranking algorithm for your content. Tuning uses a set of sample queries and best answers that you provide as a training data set to optimize the ranking algorithm.
-
Manually adjust the ranking algorithm
Funnelback provides you with the ability to manually adjust the influence provided by each of the ranking indicators. However, use this with caution.
-
Indicate sections that are particularly important or unimportant, regardless of the query
Query independent evidence (QIE) allows certain pages or groups of pages within an index (based on the document’s URL) to be considered more or less important.
-
Use the result diversification settings if you find that your results are being flooded with results from a single website/data source, or section. Result diversification mixes up the results by pushing results down in the ranking order if they have something in common with the previous result (such as results from the same site, or with the same title).
-
Group a set of results into a single search result
Use result collapsing to group a set of results together that have a common attribute (such as the same title, or same metadata field value) into a single search result.
-
Learn about the Funnelback ranking algorithm
Funnelback’s ranking algorithm determines what results are retrieved from the index and how the order of relevance is determined. This provides detail on how search results are ranked.
-
Understand why a certain result is appearing at a specific place in a set of results
The SEO auditor tool can be used to investigate the ranking for specific queries and URLs, and provides advice on how to improve the ranking of the document.