While writing a front-end for the SharePoint Search web service for work, I did some quick testing with the MOSS Search Tool to make sure things were working right under the hood.
What I found was that queries composed only of CONTAINS predicates (FREETEXT ones were fine) would have a rank of 1000 for any results that were returned. According to the documentation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms544086.aspx):
"If the query returns a document because a non–full-text predicate evaluates to TRUE for that document, the rank value is calculated as 1000."
Given that the behaviour I am seeing seems to contradict the documentation, is it the case that all queries that use only the CONTAINS predicate will produce ranking like this?