Search ranking/relevance algorithms

Question

When developing a database of articles in a Knowledge Base (for example) - what are the best ways to sort and display the most relevant answers to a users' question?

Would you use additional data such as keyword weighting based on whether previous users found the article of help, or do you find a simple keyword matching algorithm to be sufficient?

Answer 1

Perhaps the easiest and most naive approach that will give immediately useful results would be to implement *tf-idf:

Variations of the tf–idf weighting scheme are often used by search engines as a central tool in scoring and ranking a document's relevance given a user query. tf–idf can be successfully used for stop-words filtering in various subject fields including text summarization and classification.

In a recent related question of mine here I learned of an excellent free book on this topic which you can download or read online:

An Introduction to Information Retrieval

Answer 2

That's a hard question, and companies like Google are pushing a lot of efforts to address this question. Have a look at Google Enterprise Search Appliance or Exalead Enterprise Search.

Then, as a personal opinion, I don't think that any "naive" approach is going to improve much the result compared to naive keyword search and ordering by the number of views on the documents.

If you have the possibility to expose your knowledge base to the web, then, just do it, and let your favorite search engine handles the search for you.