hi Patrick,

We use an open source project called Lucene for searching, they have a great document that talks about how hits are scored here:

http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/scoring.html

We obviously do some of the work of getting items into the search index and determining what's indexed and how it's indexed, going into the details here would be a really long post. You can get a good idea of how items are indexed by checking out the source code for com.jivesoftware.community.impl.search.LocalSearchManager.  Start with the toSearchDocument(DocumentBean bean) method, take a look at the

private Field field(int objectType, IndexField name, Object value) 

implementation and the class com.jivesoftware.community.search.BoostParser class.

I'll also ask about getting some of this documented.

Cheers,

AJ

Gary, the documentation looks like it moved to: http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_3_2/scoring.html

Nova, here is a link to the search tips in the documentation which might help, and in general the best way to influence search results as an end-user is to choose a descriptive subject and add descriptive tags to the content. These two elements help with search relevance since the subject and tags of content are weighted more heavily than the body for relevance.

I hope that helps, and if you'd like more information, please ask.

has there been any updates on this subject that anyone can share? How have you enhanced your search or educated end users on searching more effectively?