How does the EBSCO host search engine determine relevancy ranking?
The EBSCO host search engine uses a proprietary relevancy ranking algorithm that determines article relevance to a user?s search terms by looking at several variables including:
Density: The number of times the word appears relative to the size of the document (more is better). Prominence: Which field the word appears in. For example, words appearing in the subject field are more important than words in full text. Frequency: The number of times the word appears in the database (fewer times is better). The individual word-level scores are summed to get an article-level score. These scores are relative to the search tag being used. For example, if you are searching TI (title field) the density is based on the title and the database frequency is based on only those words in titles in the database. With this approach, the score is based on the number of matching words and the rarity of these words.
ID: 3971 Topic: Database Products and Content, Delivery of Content Services: EBSCOhost? Research Databases Link: http://support.ebsco.com/knowledge_base/detail.php?id=3971