[htdig] What do the star ratings mean?

[Doug Schasteen]

I’m very confused by the stars, and everyone I have shown the search engine to so far has asked me what it means and I basically just BS about it. I honestly don’t understand it. Sometimes the search will find 50+ documents and give 4 stars to two items, and 2 stars to about six of them, and the other 40+ only have one star. Yet, some of the 1 star and 2 star items have all the items I was searching for right there in the excerpt. But some of the 4 star items only have a few of the items I was searching for in the excerpt. In fact, one time I found 700+ documents and only 1 item had 4 stars. That one item had none of the search items in the excerpt, but had 1 of them in the title. How did it get 4 stars above the others, which had bold items in the excerpt?   Does anyone have an explanation for this? Maybe some way to fix it?