InterMedia Text Search results

Question

We have interMedia Text enabled on our 3.0.9.8.2 install and, for Search Results, I need to understand how the percentage score is calculated and, if results have the same score, how the order is determined. Is it possible to reorder the results because it appears to be random? Can anyone point me to the relevant documentation?

Answer 1

So Stephen, if I understand correctly, you have URL items, where the URL references the content in the IFS repository. This means that these items are being indexed by the WWSBR_URL_CTX_INDX. It'd be interesting to see if the results are returned as you would expect them to be using this index alone. This will tell you if there is a problem with Intermedia Text or if the problem lies with the way that Portal is using Intermedia Text and combining the scores from the multiple indexes.
Try running a SQL query like
select i.title, score(10) scr from wwv_things i, wwsbr_url$ u
where i.id=u.object_id
and contains (u.absolute_url,'${oracle}',10) > 0
order by scr desc
This will match your search term against only text which was indexed by the URL index and returns the display name of the corresponding item. Here I've searched for the term 'oracle'; change this to whatever you were using in your testcase. Note also that the $ implies the stem operator which is used by default in Portal.
If this query doesn't return you the scores that you were expecting then the problem is to do with the way that Intermedia Text is indexing your PDF documents. If it does return what you'd expect then we need to look more closely at what Portal is doing with the scores.