weighting results based on file extension?

[Anonymous]

Searches on our site frequently turn up word docs and pdf files as the top results.

Is there a way to "unweight" .doc and .pdf files so that they turn up lower in the results returned?

[Ray]

You can create .desc files for your PDF and DOC files. Within this, you can specify a ZOOMPAGEBOOST tag which can have a negative value (-1 down to -5). This would effectively lower the weighting of words found within the corresponding PDF and DOC document.

For more information on .desc files, refer to chapter 2.10.4 in the Users Guide, and chapter 2.3.5 for ZOOMPAGEBOOST:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/usersguide.html

In the upcoming Version 4.1, we will also add a new feature to automatically scale weighting based on the word density of a page. This means that a PDF or DOC file (which often contains many words, and is the reason why they show up as top results) would be automatically scaled down to a more comparable ranking.