h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How is relevance decided on h2g2?

Are you talking about the results given by the search page when you try to find an article? If so, it's all automatic (from a programmed algorithm of course). The software estimates that based on how much the search terms you entered appear in various articles. No person is involved in decision-making at all during the process of any given search.

I know no one manually does it, I still want to know how it is decided

Well that's something at least! We've previously had people who thought someone had been through and graded their articles and wanted to complain about their "mark".

Unfortunately, I don't recall where all those earlier threads were (some of which already had a hint of the specifics you want) and, with the conversation search deliberately disabled, I don't have any simple means of re-finding them.

SEF

Yeh i was thinking i had seen something on that topic probably been buried

See F615?thread=221672 from November 2002

(psst, next time you can't find a thread, it's worth a try over at "Where's that thread?" thread, the closest thing there is to a search engine at the moment. We like a challenge! F19585?thread=612457 )

will do

that's great but no one's answered my question.

Wasn't coelacanth's link good enough? I'm sure there are more such threads (if anyone has the enthusiasm to trawl back through all the obvious help pages).

??? Now I'm confused. ...---...

What SEF means is that if you click on the first link I gave in #6 you will see the answer given to much the same question as yours in November 2002.

One of the staff back then wrote:
>>"For the technically-minded, the mechanism scores points independently for the subject line and the body text and then combines these scores with a bias towards the score from the subject line. This combined score is further modified by a multiplier depending on the entry's status, so a non-Edited Entry will have to be a much better match than an Edited one to score higher than it. The highest points are gained for an exact match of the search string entered (once 'noise words' are removed). Points are also scored separately for each word or phrase (phrases being words inside double quotes) and inflectional forms of these, with extra points for proximity of the individual phrases."

Though actually the in-quotes thing was always broken in my experience!

THANK YOU!!!! Yeah...bye now