Terms Matched Question

[Hawk]

I'm a little confused about the display of Terms Matched.
If a keyword (single word search) is found on a page more than once, why does the Terms Matched display only show 1 on the search results page?

Am I missing something or does it only display the first found keyword on a page no matter how many times that word is found on a page?

[David]

Terms, refers to the search terms. i.e. the number of words you were searching for.

So if you searched for,
dog cat bird
Then terms matched might be 0,1,2 or 3 for each page. Pages with 3 terms matched are going to be ranked more highly as they contain all the search terms.

The terms matched is unrelated to how many times words appear on a page. (The score if influenced by this however).

[Hawk]

That makes sense to me, but I wonder how many casual visitors to a site would understand that.

Would it be possible in the next version to make the matched terms show how many times the keyword is found on the linked to page?

I have the highlight and jump option enabled, but it seems some folks don't understand that they have to scroll down the page to see if there's more highlighted keywords.

[David]

Would it be possible in the next version to make the matched terms show how many times the keyword is found on the linked to page?

No we won't be changing it. Terms matched is an important part of the ranking algorithm. But there is an option in the software not to display the value if you find it confusing. Under "Configure"->"Results Layout", uncheck "Terms matched".

We don't keep an exact count of how many times each word is on each page. There is only the score value which is a combination of several factors, and is more than a simple count.

You could try 1) Reducing the size of your pages to avoid the need to scroll as much, or 2) Try and educate your users that sometimes you need to scroll the page to see all the content, or 3) Implement some type of custom javascript function on your pages to allow jumping forward and backwards within the page to display matches, or 4) suggest that your users use CTRL-F in their browser to find text on a page.

[Hawk]

Thanks for your reply.