Ranking in Results of Index Folder Search

DEVONthink Tips
1

Dear Users,

I have been searching an indexed folder containing PDFs for two terms — one with a wildcard. DEVONthink ranked first a PDF that contains 20 occurences of the search terms and third a PDF that contains 458 occurences of the search terms. I was wondering whether anyone had an explanation for this behavior — unexpected on my part — and whether there is any way to modify a search such that files with greater numbers of occurences of the search terms are ranked higher than files with smaller numbers of occurences of the search terms. Thank you for your consideration.

Best regards,
Enrico

2

The number of occurrences is not the only criterium. E.g. the length of documents, their contents and metadata and the exact matches of the wildcard in the documents are also relevant (and more stuff).

1 Like
3

Thank you for the clarification. Are the precise rules used by the search engine available somewhere or are they part of a proprietary algorithm and therefore unavailable to users? Thank you for your consideration.

4

The rules are proprietary and change every now and then.

5

I understand. Thank you for clarifying that for me.