Search ranking/relevance algorithms

Question

When developing a database of articles in a Knowledge Base (for example) - what are the best ways to sort and display the most relevant answers to a users\' question?

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Answer 1

That's a hard question, and companies like Google are pushing a lot of efforts to address this question. Have a look at Google Enterprise Search Appliance or Exalead Enterprise Search.

Then, as a personal opinion, I don't think that any "naive" approach is going to improve much the result compared to naive keyword search and ordering by the number of views on the documents.

If you have the possibility to expose your knowledge base to the web, then, just do it, and let your favorite search engine handles the search for you.