How are results ranked in Science Topics?
The Thesaurus development group has long recognized an undesirable arbitrariness in the manner in which results are shown to users of the Science Topics interface of the USGS home page. With the assistance of a few members of the USGS Web Advisory Group or their designees, the thesaurus group has come to agreement on a practical solution to this problem. Original implementation: There is no objective measure of relevance, so the database and application software we use cannot automatically arrange results in order of decreasing relevance. As a rough approximation, the Science Topics interface arranged results in order according to how well the title of an entry matched the category name. Specifically, web sites appeared higher when • title matches the category name, • title begins with the category name, • title contains the category name, • title matches any of the lead-in terms, • title begins with any of those terms, • title contains any of those terms all other records were listed
