When processing a search agent, the Verity search engine calculates a score for each selected document behind the scenes. A document score can be in the range from 1.0 to 0.01. The higher a document’s score, the more relevant it is. Using the score assignments for documents selected by a search agent, Verity applications can present relevance-ranked results in descending order to application users.
The ranking of documents is determined by the elements which comprise your search criteria. Document ranking can be affected depending on whether the search criteria includes topics, and whether topics include weights.
When creating topics, you can assign weights to the topic structure to indicate the relative importance of specific aspects of the topic definition. For example, you may be interested in two related subjects, but one subject is more important than another. Note that you do not have to assign weights when you compose topics because default weights are assigned as appropriate when a topic set is indexed. However, by assigning weights you can fine-tune the importance of things you are looking for.
