How SharePoint 2013 Ranking models work

Insights into search black magic

Introduction

Think of search as a two phase process, firstly search engine identifies documents that match query, secondly it performs ranking to predicts relevancy of each document. Typically search engines calculate rank taking into account many different things including attributes of document, importance of query terms, user clicks and so on – all of them are called ranking features.

Let’s review SharePoint 2013 ranking models in details : which features do they include, how it works and where it can be configured.

A list of available ranking models can be obtains using following commands in powershell:

(pay attention that in 2nd line there should be NO $ near  -Level ssa,  MSDN example contains this typo (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607990.aspx)

Here’s a list of available ranking models:

• Default Ranking Model
• Catalog ranking Model
• Recommender ranking model
• People Search expertise social distance ranking model
• People Search name social distance ranking model

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