Search ranking/relevance algorithms
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?
Would you use additional data such as keyword weighting based on whether previous users found the article of help, or do you find a simple keyword matching algorithm to be sufficient?
Answer
Perhaps the easiest and most naive approach that will give immediately useful results would be to implement *tf-idf:
Variations of the tf–idf weighting scheme are often used by search engines as a central tool in scoring and ranking a document's relevance given a user query. tf–idf can be successfully used for stop-words filtering in various subject fields including text summarization and classification.
In a recent related question of mine here I learned of an excellent free book on this topic which you can download or read online: