Question: Dynamic wieghting based on viewing?

[Jerren]

Question: How difficult would it be to have Zoom automatically weight content based on how often it is viewed from the search screen? Is this even possible? I'm working with a potential customer who wants to have content "self tune" its weight based on the idea that the most used pages for a particular query are the most relevant and should automatically bubble up to the top rather than have a content manager manually manipulate the content to weight it higher.

[David]

It would be a fair amount of extra coding to make this happen.

Extra information would need to be stored in the index about which pages users though were the 'best' for which words. After a large number of searches this would grow into a large amount of data (and continue to grow indefinitely).

I also have some doubts about if it would work. People rarely look past the 1st page of result. So I think there would be a lot of clicks that would just reinforce the existing rankings. That is to say, if a page was already the #1 result, it would have a tendency to continue to be the #1 result. (and page #15 might take many months or years to creep up to the top).

It would also need to be a popular site for this to work, with maybe 100's of searches per day. Also at the moment we don't update the index on the fly. Doing this as your suggest would slow down searching, or require post processing, and also require that extra permissions were available to re-write the files on the server from a script.

[Jerren]

It would be a fair amount of extra coding to make this happen.

Extra information would need to be stored in the index about which pages users though were the 'best' for which words. After a large number of searches this would grow into a large amount of data (and continue to grow indefinitely).

I also have some doubts about if it would work. People rarely look past the 1st page of result. So I think there would be a lot of clicks that would just reinforce the existing rankings. That is to say, if a page was already the #1 result, it would have a tendency to continue to be the #1 result. (and page #15 might take many months or years to creep up to the top).

It would also need to be a popular site for this to work, with maybe 100's of searches per day. Also at the moment we don't update the index on the fly. Doing this as your suggest would slow down searching, or require post processing, and also require extra permissions were available to re-write the files on the server from a script.

Please contact me then so we can discuss this in detail, this is a standard feature of Autonomy, MindServer, and others out there. Obviously they are not $500 products but we are interested in working on this with you.