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?
You can find a discussion of how to affect your rankings at http://www.htdig.org/confindex.html and looking for (probably among others):
title_factor description_factor text_factor heading_factor keywords_factor backlink_factor
Words showing up in the title, by default, will be 100 times more effective than words showing up in the paragraphs.
You can also go to http://www.htdig.org/confindex.html and do a search on "ranking" or "factor" to find past discussions on this topic. You might find http://www.htdig.org/mail/2000/03/0130.html helpful.
The FAQ (4.25) at http://www.htdig.org/FAQ.html also has a short discussion of ranking.
Jerry
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.sandiego.edu/~jerry/
Serra 188B/x8773
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