Posted by John Hicks on 01/19/05 18:35

Michael Sims wrote:

>Richard Lynch wrote:
>
>
>>Brian A. Anderson wrote:
>>
>>
>[...]
>
>
>>>I am thinking of incrementally adding the resultant hits into two
>>>associative arrays with the link to the data and a calculated
>>>relevance value, and sorting this array by these relevences.
>>>
>>>
>[...]
>
>
>>One Axiom: Keep as much of the scoring/sorting in your SQL as
>>possible -- That's what SQL engines are best at.
>>
>>
>
>I suggest the original poster look into some of the full text indexing
>capabilities of his SQL server. A lot of these (for PostgreSQL and MySQL
>anyway) will automatically return a relevance value and handle sorting based
>on that. As you said, that'll be a heck of a lot more efficient and easier
>to implement that doing it in PHP.
>
>
Agreed. I use MySQL's full-text indexing and sort by the relevance
score, and it works well.

If you do a search for a business at this (now retired) site:
http://lwcc.gulfbridge.com , you'll see the relevance scores in
parentheses next to each result. One trick I use to limit the display to
the most relevant items is to look for a significant drop in this score
from one item to the next. I stop listing when the score drops by 40% or
so from the last item displayed.

-John

[Back to original message]