Is there a programmatic way to influence the rank of search results in MOSS (Sharepoint) 2007?

Question

Searches in Sharepoint rely on SQL Server as far as I know.

I have an internal search project based on MOSS 2007, where users can search keywords in archives. My idea is to take some statistics data (page hits, recent visits, user voting, etc.) into consideration and affect the final rank returned to the user.

So, is there a way to influence the rank of search results?

Answer 1

You can assign Weight to Managed Properties, check out this link:

How to: Change the Weight Setting for a Managed Property.

It is a slippery slope though, as this post here on SO shows:

sharepoint-search-property-weighting

Answer 2

Take a look at this MSDN article. And this, Improving relevance.

Also, you can affect the ranking by weighting managed properties, described here.

Brian Wilson has a blog article about Fine tuning search relevancy.

Answer 3

MOSS Rankings are dependent on many factors few could be controlled problematically they are as follows

1. by adding authoritative pages links in search settings
2. By adding links to demoted sites in search settings
3. By Using anchor tags crawling
4. Defining best bets for documents

following article gives detail about MOSS rankings

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms549085.aspx