Here in North Texas we are on 1.4, but we had a similar problem.  A keyword 
search on "wildlife" would have many pages of results, but items where 
"Wildlife" was the complete one-word title would be buried many pages down 
instead of at the top.  We knew Evergreen could do better because a similar 
search on the Georgia PINES catalog would correctly bring the one-word titles 
to the top.  
 
Our Evergreen support is handled by Equinox. Once the problem was brought to 
their attention, they were able to fix the problem.  I don't know how they did 
it - something about adjusting relevancy ranking weights.
 
 
Judy Daniluk
Technology Consultant, North Texas Regional Library System
6320 Southwest Blvd, Suite 101, Fort Worth, TX 76109
[email protected]         817-201-6778 (cell)      817-377-4440 (office)       
 www.ntrls.org <http://www.ntrls.org/>  
 

________________________________

From: [email protected] on behalf of Melissa 
Belvadi
Sent: Wed 1/13/2010 11:39 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-DEV] ***SPAM*** a question/comment about relevance ranking



We are now on 1.6. I still don't understand the relevance ranking system, or 
perhaps disagree with it, or maybe we can tweak it locally? 


Here's a search I just did:  keyword: food society 


The very first hit, sorted by "relevance" was: 

Free radicals and oxidative stress : environment, drugs and food additives / 
organized and edited by C. Rice-Evans, B. Halliwell and G.G. Lunt. 

Somewhere in the "local notes" was a mention of the publication being 
affiliated with a professional society. The word society appears in the author 
and that note, but not in title or subject headings. 


The next several were more or less the same kind as the first. 


Way down at position 9 was this gem, which is exactly the kind of book  I had 
in mind: 

The Cultural feast : an introduction to food and society / Carol A. Bryant ... 
[et al.]. 


As a librarian, I would expect that matches to my keywords appearing in the 
title to have the very highest weight, then (or possibly co-equal) subject 
headings, and much lower down in the formula would be 5xx fields and author 
fields. 


Is this a philosophical problem or a technical one? Can we modify the ranking 
algorithm locally at the level of individual MARC tags or even index groupings 
(eg things in the title index, subject index, etc.)? 


Thanks! 


Melissa 



---
Melissa Belvadi
Emerging Technologies & Metadata Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
[email protected]
902-566-0581 



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