Hey,<br><br>I have proposed an idea to work on ranking/weighting schemes with Xapian using Xapian's suggested ideas list and also putting in a bit of my own input. I am pasting my project proposal here because I wanted to discuss it out. <br>
<br><p><span style="font-size: small;">Project Discussion: When results are
indexed into the search index, they must be ranked before hand for
faster information retrieval. Now this is where I plan to work, on
ranking/weighting schemes. I picked up this idea mainly from Xapian's
suggested ideas and clubbed my idea into it. So I believe that if we
have n number of search results and we want to rank them, we should
start of by the most efficient ranking algorithm to determine their
ranks. It might happen, that two or more documents end up getting the
same weight or rank and this is where layering comes into picture. For
all those documents where a clash would occur, we can implement another
ranking algorithm which would be the next most efficient one at our so
called 2nd level of ranking. This can be done further and further till
the user wants or maybe till all the algorithms get used up. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;">I have studies these algorithms but I
have no idea if this scheme has been suggested or used before since
most search engines never reveal their working. So we can provide the
user a choice to choose his own custom hierarchy of algorithms if he has
knowledge about them or this can be automated in cases where the user
doesn't know about these algorithms. Vector space models, TF-IDF schemes
can be implemented and in case of hyperlinked documents link analysis
algorithms like Pagerank, HITS, Distance rank, Snorm , Trust rank could
be brought into picture.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">I would love to discuss about the project and would love any advice given to me on how to break it down the timeline. Please let me know if I need to add in any more information aswell.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;">Thanks<br></span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Regards</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Prateek<br></span></p><br>