building a better search
Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 2:47 pm
I'm soon going to need to rewrite/enhance a search engine for a site. What I need it to do is give results priority based on the number of times they were successfully searched for. In other words, if 50 people go searching for "Canned Pork," 30 of them look at the results and click on "Ye Olde Canned Pork," 10 of them click on "Canned Pork MX-7", and the rest click on an assortment of other results, the engine needs to know to provide "Ye Olde Canned Pork" as the first search result every time. Of course I mean this should be dynamic and automatic, so that if MX-7 Canned Pork starts to become more popular as a result, the search engine makes that the #1 result. This is similar to what Google does.
I have no idea how to do it, really. Obviously, there's a table that's tracking searches somewhere, but how do I track the results that people pick first when they do a search, and then match it to what they searched for, and then use that data to influence future search results?
I have no idea how to do it, really. Obviously, there's a table that's tracking searches somewhere, but how do I track the results that people pick first when they do a search, and then match it to what they searched for, and then use that data to influence future search results?