How Replies Are Ranked

How Replies to a Query are Ranked

• The way replies to a query are ranked depends on which "Sort" tab is selected (at the top of the Results page).

• The choices are "relevance | references | number | modified | created". The default is "relevance"; the others are count of references, A-number, most recently modified, and most recently created.

• The "relevance" order is a match score, breaking ties with number of references, and breaking further ties with A-number. The match score is a sum of the match scores for each individual term in the query. The score for a term is 30 points for matching A-number, 20 for matching in the title, 20 for matching in sequence data, 10 for matching only in absolute value sequence data. There is an additional score of n**2 for n query terms appearing in a row in the matched text. So if you search for catalan numbers, finding catalan numbers is better than finding just catalan or 'catalan and prime numbers' or any other text where the two words do not appear side by side.

• This page was created on August 19, 2015 by Neil Sloane, based on information provided by Russ Cox