my team and I are working on a football hub website and we would like to make the in-page search engine as powerful as possible as many uses would like to use search.
Q: Are there any best practice algorithms out there we could adopt?
To achieve better results other than a brute force word match we thought of the following "algorithm":
Ranking of results
Results are ranked by the following criteria:
First ranking
Results are ranked higher if keywords appear in one of the following parts parts of a page:
- Title
- Abstract
- Body text
- Tags
(Sorted by importance (high to low) articles/features/news and the like)
Second ranking
Keywords that appear in tags will increase the individual ranking of an result.
Frequency of words
A higher frequency will result in a higher ranking of a result.
Cross references
A page that got referenced from other internal pages will be ranked higher.
Keywords
We also would like to include the following features in our search:
- Spell check with suggestions if misspelled
- Synonyms for frequently used words
- Auto complete search box
Many thanks for all thoughts, replies and links.
Christian